


[Fight] not Flight, [Fury] not Fright

by Badendchan



Category: RWBY
Genre: Adam being a pissbiscuit as usual, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bees Not Wanting To Make The First Move Even Though They Are Honestly So Gay, Bumbleby - Freeform, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, First Dates, First Kiss, Flashbacks to Violence interspersed with Sapphic Softness And Reconciliation, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Leisurely-but-not-slow Burn, Mutual Pining, Recovery, Taiyang rolling his eyes at youthful pining, Volume 4 (RWBY), What-If, this is a mistake
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-02
Updated: 2021-01-23
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:27:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 34,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27828967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Badendchan/pseuds/Badendchan
Summary: Blake Belladonna’s long-conditioned trauma response is to run. But what if, in one particular pivotal instance, it wasn’t? What if, on that terrible night that changed Team RWBY's world forever, her instincts pushed her to choose a long, desperate fight, instead of taking flight?On a chilly evening in the early spring following the Fall of Beacon, the Rose-Xiao Long household receives an unexpected visitor - a freezing feline faunus soaked to the bone, battered and bruised from a climactic battle, and beyond all else, dead-set on returning straight to her partner's side."H-he can't hurt us anymore."
Relationships: Blake Belladonna/Yang Xiao Long
Comments: 165
Kudos: 288





	1. Late-Night Reunion

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, uh. Not really sure what I'm doing here, oops. Still not a writer, still not any good! 
> 
> And, I've got other WIP ideas for RWBY I should be working on, and an ongoing 3H thing, but-- But then, I realized I've had this first chapter sitting here for weeks now, so I figure... Maybe I'll just... post it here at least, and try to get the ball rolling again, maybe course-correct along the way?
> 
> Here's some junk food. Unbeta'd as always. Apologies.

Patch rarely weathered storms like these, the chilly vestiges of late winter and spring’s penchant for rain both wanting a hand in pelting the island with harsh sleet and buffeting wind. It’s beyond dark, the stormclouds too thick for the shattered moon's rays to pierce with more than the occasional sliver.

At the edge of a muddied forest footpath, washed over long before the rain began to freeze, a thornbush rustles. Beastly, black, blood-matted ears flex and sway in search of sounds above the roar of the storm, illuminated by a curl of lightning in the clouds above.

Creeping up the countryside in perfect shadow, a predator’s silhouette stalks ever-closer to a humble cabin home and its weary human inhabitants.

* * *

Taiyang yawns.

For huntsmen and for schoolteachers, late nights aren't a novelty, and as one of both, he liked to think he still had the knack for it. Maybe he’s just getting old – a fact his daughters are ever-so-keen to bring up.

But there’s no call for a huntsman tonight, just essay papers to grade, as Signal Academy attempts to rally for the first new semester after the Fall of Beacon just across the pond. Tai’d been lucky none of his closer coworkers had gone missing in the chaos, but a few students from his class were conspicuously absent, either called closer to family effected by the disaster, or moving to the further reaches of Vale, away from ground zero.

Those papers had begun to get the better of him, and that’s how he finds himself carefully stirring Vacuan chocolate into a saucepot he’s left simmering milk and piloncillo for the last few minutes. It’s been a fair while since he’s made _champurrado_ , but the monotonous, moody nature of the night has him feeling a bit nostalgic; the beverage had become something of a staple for Team STRQ's trips up north, on the rare hunt in Solitas.

Qrow'd picked up the recipe back in their school years from some geeky Grimm Reaper CCTS fan-forum, where friend-of-a-friend-of-a-doctor's-cousin rumors claimed she'd always asked for the stuff coming through an inn on a chilly day. The remainder of the team teased him relentlessly for believing the stories, but sure enough, it was just the thing for an unseasonably cold Spring night, warm and bracing.

It wasn't just for his own sake that he'd gone to the trouble, either. Ever since his eldest daughter had been brought home after the Fall of Beacon, her sleep schedule was erratic as all get-out, and oftentimes they'd have traffic jams on the stairs: The older Xiao Long heading up to bed, the younger shambling down to stare at campy infomercials until her mind finally mellowed. It had been another capital-B capital-D _Bad Day_ for Yang’s phantom pain, and it surprised him enough she'd managed to tuck in early and stay asleep in the first place, much less remain that way with the deluge pelting their humble home as loudly as it was. So now, if the thundering does wake her? At least she’ll have a warm drink.

That heavy _**whump**_ at the front door might wake Yang, too. Tai almost fumbles his eggbeater.

 _Threat Assessment:_ It is a dark, stormy night, and Taiyang has seen at least one horror movie in his life. It’s late, nobody has called ahead, else his scroll would have sounded, nor has a public Grimm alert gone out, nor even a tripping of their perimeter sensors. His brother-in-law’s on another continent, keeping watch over his wayward youngest, Barty and Peter wouldn’t swing back around so soon after their visit earlier in the week, and… Grimm don’t usually knock.

_**Whump-ump.** _

Taiyang takes his half-finished _atole_ safely off the burner and tries to get a vantage from the kitchen window. Nothing out there but the storm, but no skulking, circling red-eyed monsters illuminated by the lightning, either. _Why is he so apprehensive? He was a member of Team STRQ, for cryin' out loud!_

Guess there's nothing for it. If this is how he dies, at least he managed to fit the hapless victim cliche to a T. On his way out to the front door, he glances towards the stairwell, and still no Yang. Good. She needs the rest, and surely whatever this is all about isn't something she needs to be bothered with.

Taiyang's hand stalls on the doorknob, still raking his brain for possibilities, all until his rationality gives him a rough shove and tells him to get on with it. He flicks on the porch light and opens up into the frigid night.

“ _Please...”_

No Grimm. No beasts. No bandits.

Just a familiar face, easily recognized from the Xiao Long-Rose family group chat on their scrolls, a face peppered across his daughters' countless candid snapshots of their first year at Beacon. A face not seen since the Vytal Festival months ago, where it all went to hell. A face attached to a name, one of the two most prominent shouted throughout his daughter's night terrors.

Blake Belladonna looks like— _well, for lack of a better phrase_ —a drowned cat, huddled there on his porch, hugging herself tight. The inclement weather's soaked her ruddy clothing through, hair and shoulders speckled with sleet, the exposed midriff inside her long jacket betraying an unpreparedness for the forecast. The bruises and scrapes point to a bad encounter or two, and that’s not to mention the traces of mud all over – not just wet, some of it long dried.

_"Please... where is... I have to... Where's Yang?"_

Before Tai can speak a word, the girl staggers a step closer under the porch lights, illuminating her in full even as it briefly blinds her sensitive faunus eyes, forcing her to squint until her night-vision wears out. Her head turns with the reflex, revealing a nasty, sizable gash halfway up from the base of her upper-right ear, an inch into the sensitive cartilage.

Where initially Taiyang had thought the girl was only grasping her arms around herself for warmth and propriety, only then did he notice the very edge of some fabric bundle poking out from between her fingers, clutching it to her chest like a sacred relic. She’s armed, but her weapon is stowed, here for sanctuary, not a fight.

When Yang’s partner disappeared after all the calamity, that old, familiar ache had flared up in Tai's chest, sparked by the bitter thought that his baby would have to suffer yet another figure close to her, another loved one, abandoning her in a time of need, never to return--

_But now, that figure is back, drenching his living room couch with blood, mud, and melted sleet._

* * *

Gods damn it.

She almost had it, this time. Five hours of consecutive sleep in one go? When’s the last time _that_ happened? Probably months ago when she was still doped up on max-dose anesthetic, down for the count as the doctors put the finishing touches cleaning and capping her involuntary amputation.

Yang sits up in bed, as always attempting to sling the covers off herself with a limb that isn’t there, before growling and using the opposite.

It’s still storming outside, same as she remembers when she conked out, though mellowed down to a steady rain with the occasional frozen plink peppered in. ~~_Blake_~~ Her team might’ve always called her a human space-heater, but even space-heaters get cold, especially when they’re only sporting shorts and a ratty old tank-top. Her ghost of an arm isn’t exactly temperature-sensitive, but the chill doesn’t _help_ with the ache, either. Maybe she’ll nag Dad to turn the heat up, just for tonight.

Speaking of Dad, Yang catches a whiff of spice and sweetness, something chocolatey, as she shoulders her way into the hall and starts for the stairs. Good timing, she figures, if she’s going to have to wait for her brain to shut up and settle.

As she clomps downstairs, she immediately notices a lack of vacancy on the couch she’d full intention of occupying with her tired self – a wrapped-up, messy black-haired lump of a person who definitely isn’t her Dad, hunkered inward on itself under the covers.

It’s not an entirely unfamiliar sight; it’s practically an institution of the Xiao Long-Rose household for a certain drunken uncle to drop back in at any hour of the night, lost in the sauce. _Figures,_ _Qrow_ _’d_ _only_ _show back up_ _RIGHT_ _when she_ _just_ _wants to_ _plonk_ _down and watch some_ _mindless_ _TV._

She doesn’t bother expending mental energy wondering why in the world he’s back here on Sanus, instead of chasing Ruby around Anima right now. Just keeps walking, paying the boozed-up old huntsman no mind as she drifts for the kitchen to shake her Dad down for some of… whatever he’s making.

The lights are brighter in the kitchen, and Yang blearily readjusts to find her father doling himself out a refill in a serving mug. “Oh, hey, sweetheart,” he greets her with a sympathetic grimace, “sleep not working out?”

“Nnnnnnope.” The ‘P’ is popped hard. They’ve done this plenty, the question’s a formality.

There’s an odd look in her old man’s eye as he sizes her up, shooting a glance to the door she’d come through and back again. “I… ah. I take it you noticed we have a _visitor._ ”

Yang’s attention is entirely dedicated to the formerly-simple task of retrieving a mug from the overhead cupboard with only one arm, and her response is as clipped as it is tired: “Eeeyup. So much for _that_ trip lasting long.”

Returning the various ingredients to their homes, Tai slows as he chews on his daughter’s phrasing. “You’re… taking it better than I expected, her being here,” he continues, aiming to be tactful in his confusion.

“ **...Her?”**

Yang turns. _Her?_ Ruby came back? The couchlump had black hair, sure, so maybe she'd just missed her sister’s red tips? ...But they’d looked too tall for that, and Ruby tended to be a sprawler, not a burrito. Changing her trajectory from the steaming saucepot, Yang veers out from the kitchen to peer at the shape on the couch.

A suspiciously triangular protrusion of hair wiggles and curls. Yang loses her mug.

Taiyang’s gotten himself a new reflex training regimen out of catching fallen breakables since his daughter’s injury, so this is nothing new. He swipes the thing a couple inches from the floor, despite his protesting back _(He’s not old!)_ and gives a prayer of thanks he hadn’t yet poured her a batch.

Carried by a glut of emotions Yang can't quite parse, she dashes for the other room, even leaping the low entertainment center table to get to the couch a split-second sooner. _She has to know. She has to be sure._

And it **is.**

Her wayward partner, Blake Belladonna, after months missing from her life, missing in _general,_ is now laid up in her living room in the middle of the night, shivering under layers of old blankets, the very same she'd once burrowed under on sick days home from Signal.

The feline's ears wiggle once more, and with a dull whine, the blankets begin to slip away as she attempts to sit up. Attempts to blink the blonde blur before her into focus.

_"Yang..."_

The weak way she calls her name paralyzes Yang in place, words mustering in futility only to die halfway up her throat. Her runaway partner, looking even more roughed-up and rugged than the night she'd been _stabbed_ , the emotional pain twisting her face a darkly comical contrast to the sunny-yellow sweater Tai'd stuck her with to warm up. _Another o_ _ne of Yang's. From before._

Blake begins to unfurl herself, and subsequently, the bundle of cloth she's held fast to her chest. It falls open atop the faunus' lap, revealing its contents: a pile of sharp crimson blade-shards, crowned with an angular ceramic half-mask, all-too-familiar, shallow cracks trailing from one of its four grooved eye-slits, its formerly white surface chipped and rusty-red-smeared.

Yang's lungs become a vacuum. Her blood runs ice-floe cold, her missing arm sears red-hot.

_"H-he can't hurt us anymore."_

Instantly, wide violet eyes find their match in half-lidded gold, her _pain_ mirrored, _regret_ mirrored. _Contrition._ Even in her disbelief, Yang can see so _much_ in that look alone.

 _"_ _W_ _on't..._ _ever hurt you again... because of_ _me..."_ is the last Blake whispers, before consciousness fails her again. Her head lolls back onto the armrest, lips parted in shallow breaths.

“Blake...? Blake?! _BLAKE!_ ”

A warm hand lightly claps onto Yang's shoulder from behind, even as she's about to reach for the recuperating faunus with her one good arm and shake-shake-shake her awake, _needing more answers, needing more of anything._

"She's fine – or, she's going to be, anyway. Turned up about an hour ago, soaked to the bone, nothing much on her except her sword and…” Taiyang scoops up the thick cloth and all it contains, uncovering the emblem of a pale Beowolf head, triple-claw slashed. Plucking the fractured mask from the bunch, he angles it to where Yang can see. “I’m… guessing this thing means something to the two of you?”

Yang closes her eyes. She can’t look right now.

“ _...Adam.”_

And that puts his curiosity on ice. No more needs to be said. Taiyang would _LIKE_ there to be more, but the only one with the real answers is out cold, and thus he’s left standing stunned with the mask of the man who mauled his sunny little dragon in his very hands. He ties up the flag with its grisly contents and stows it over to the side with a pile of wadded towels, the nest where _Gambol Shroud_ is hidden, resting with Blake’s sodden gear.

“We’ll… Uh. Phew. Alright. There’s a lot to unpack here. But she’s not in any danger; I gave her some of your old clothes to change into, before we had a case of hypothermia on our hands. Had to check her levels with my scroll, since hers looks like it’s busted – Aura’s weak, but it’s up again, back on the mend from… something she’s gotten into lately. Did a quick once-over disinfecting cuts and surface wounds, getting some bandages on, but--” He points to a feature, drawing Yang’s attention to another dire detail she’d missed entirely, while he rests the other hand on his hip. “But I don’t trust myself to work on her ear; I’ll need to see if there are any faunus-specialized doctors down in town tomorrow..."

 _Tomorrow. Oh, right. There are moments outside of this one._ _Linear t_ _ime will go on. Blake is here. Blake will continue to be here. Blake will still be here in the morning, to talk to._ _To…_ _just be. Here._

“She was asking for you, you know. The whole time.”

Yang turns, tentatively standing up again to eye her father. “I… assumed, yeah.”

“No, I mean – Honey, it was tunnel-vision. I practically had to sweep her up and dump her on the couch myself, just to stop her from wandering upstairs to wake you. I couldn’t get a word out of her, other than a couple ‘pleases’ when I let her inside, ‘thank-yous’ when I got a warm drink in her, and... asking for her partner. I think she wandered the whole way here from the docks in shock. And I mean, actual shock, circulatory shock.”

It’s impossible to quell all these mounting emotions crashing against her anymore, like waves violently lashing a coastline around a tall, shining lighthouse of… _Hope? Relief? Will it even last this time?_ Tears Yang hadn’t even realized were budding threaten to drop.

“She… _This whole time!_ She never called, never visited, never told any of us where she was – I thought I _hated her_ because she didn’t stay, I _missed her_ because she didn’t stay, I _needed her_ because she was my-- And I didn’t know what to think, I didn’t know _anything_ , and… now she’s… what am I even supposed to do right now?

Taiyang lets a few seconds roll by before he asks, sincerely, “What do you _want_ to do right now?”

Blake is still sleeping unsoundly, lost to the world when Yang smudges her eyes and turns back to look. The lesser pangs of splitting emotion are nothing. One unsubtle sentiment remains, unspoken, and she lets that guide her choice. She tugs and jostles the blankets over Blake until her partner is tucked in tight, then lowers onto the empty cushion adjacent.

“...To stay with her.”

The Father Dragon exhales through his nose, a sadly understanding smile on his face. “I’ll go pour you a mug.”

Yang pulls out her scroll and pops on the TV display in muted mode, all for the impression of doing anything other than obsessing, but she couldn’t pay any less attention to either. Her father brings her a toasty dose of his old team’s weird Vacuan spin on hot chocolate before saying goodnight, and leaves her to her thoughts… of which there are many, but one fact is foremost of all. The only realization as staggering as Blake’s return:

_**Adam Taurus is dead.** _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh god, this fic is an edgy, cliche-riddled mistake, I'm sorry, it'll probably be really lame, I'm not even a WRITERRRRRRRRR...
> 
> M'only really loitering around [Twitter](https://twitter.com/Badendchan) these days. Bleep bloop.


	2. Branching Paths

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fwiw this is dumb, edgy, pretty lame, you won't like it. I mean there's not even any gay kisses. I should have gay kisses in every chapter what am I even DOING with my life

_...And as I set out upon this world and deliver the justice mankind so greatly deserves, I will make it my mission to_ _destroy everything you love._

Outskirts of Vale Proper, second barricade, triage center. Though, to refer to it as such is generous; the medical hands and on-site huntsmen just want to cling to an illusion of control and competency, here on the night of The Fall.

Blake awakens to burning. In her navel, in her heart… _in her eyes?_

There’s a bent goose-neck lamp blasting her with flickering fluorescence from above, and the quilting of a sleeping bag beneath her barely obscures the uneven surface of the storage crates they’ve draped it over to form an impromptu surgical bed. Thin tubes run from a pair of bags precariously dangled on a spare coat rack down to the needles taped in her bicep and forearm.

Squinting, she endures the ache of movement to loll her head to the side and examine the room around her, only to find it’s not even a room: Just a small single-occupant nook among a dozen others, partitioned off with stained privacy screens and sheets draped over clotheslines, all inside a larger, equally ramshackle tent. _Just like the old days,_ she thinks, with an unfriendly sort of nostalgia.

Craning her neck up to examine herself, someone has left her vest undone, fully exposing the garish stab wound just above her waistline. Presumably, by whatever beleaguered field medic applied the rush-job of cleaning and stitching the jagged gash, then scuttled off before actually bandaging the thing. At least the blood’s dried.

From the other surrounding beds come an overlapping racket of groans and sobs. Outside, the din of Grimm and gunfire remain, perhaps an extra second spliced in between each beastly howl than when she’d lost consciousness. The blaring of Grimm alert sirens is conspicuously absent. It’s not like they were necessary any longer; everyone knows. No one’s sleeping but the wounded and the dead.

But louder than any siren, in Blake’s mind, echoes the voice of the man she once called a mentor, a leader, a lover:

_...To destroy everything you love._

Only wisps of memory present themselves over the haze of waking, and that inescapable promise playing on loop: Ruby, unconscious, processed quickly and carted off to Patch. Weiss, spirited away to her homeland by the Schnee Patriarch. And Yang, _**Yang,**_ hauled into a separate medevac airship, even as she reached for her, begged to be taken wherever she went… She’s alone now.

_And she deserves to be. After all, she did this._

The roiling guilt surges hard within her stomach, her lungs, leaving her short of breath. Everything Cinder did tonight would not have been possible, in this magnitude and cohesion, without the White Fang. Adam’s cell, driven by their leader’s rage, rage Blake exacerbated with her actions, with her mere presence. Would he have even gone this far, if she had just stayed with him, compliant? Or chosen to run somewhere other than Beacon? Would as many people have been put to slaughter? Penny, Pyrrha, survived the night? Would Yang have not been left with a permanent reminder?

_She did this._

If the weight of that blame weren’t enough, every individual shard of her mind is locked in a screaming match, her age-old instincts telling her to _run_ , to _get out,_ to _leave, before she hurts someone else, to purge the poison that is herself._ _To run, please, please just run._

_**But...** isn’t that just what she’d done before?_

No matter where she flees, where she hides if she so chooses, is that going to be enough to stop what’s been set in motion? Enough to satisfy Adam’s bloodlust? Even if she gives up and dies right here, just walks out into the street and waits for a Nevermore to bite the bait, what if he comes for Yang nevertheless, to spite Blake’s spirit even in the afterlife? To kill her for the crime of sullying his property with delusions of escape? And once he’s done with her, who next? The others, Ruby and Weiss? Her parents back home?

_Destroy everything you love._

_She wants to run. She wants it to stop._ _And s_ _he_ _has_ _to run, and she_ _has_ _it to_ _make it_ _stop, she_ _has_ _to stop him. She wants to stop him._ _She can’t run._ _She needs to_ _ **stop**_ _him, by any means necessary._ _Just make it stop._ _ **Please just stop.**_

Hissing in frustration with her frenzied, anesthetic-addled thoughts, Blake recklessly yanks the IVs from her arm and leaps from the makeshift bed, clutching her freshly-sutured wound. Not a soul seems to notice save a local chaplain, pausing in his reading-of-rites for the dying a few beds over. Even his attention is short-lived, once he sees the tufts atop Blake’s head; he’s already spent enough time tonight reluctantly nodding and smiling his way through requests to be heard by the old faunus gods, of which he knows precious little. He’ll let this one be.

Blake returns the discourtesy and ignores the man. Just swipes up her scroll and _Gambol Shroud_ from the cart beside her ‘bed’ and staggers out the tent’s tarpaulin flaps into the night.

The triage is one of several, she finds, thick green shelters old enough to be Great War surplus smattering a barricaded lot in front of an old hardware and sporting goods shopping center, pillaged for resources to help bolster the meager defenses. No medic stops her to demand she return to rest, no guards question her as she wanders. With so many people bustling by, wounded and weapon-toting, she blends right in.

Across the street from the parking-lot-turned-staging-ground, a grizzled huntsman lays down a sputtering wall of flame with his weapon, cutting short a stampede of Creeps making their way down towards the city limits from the campus grounds. His team partners coordinate with the local first responders, ferrying civilians and captured radical Fang militants behind the established perimeter. Tracer rounds still spark through the air above, flitting between the remaining Atlesian airship detachment and the smaller, hijacked White Fang transports peeling off from Beacon’s smoldering, Grimm-swarmed husk.

Where are those transports going? What will they do when they get there? Celebrate the slaughter they’ve caused? Stand atop the pile of innocent faunus dead, and cheer that the pile of humans is just that little bit higher?

_...Maybe THAT one will have an answer._

Blake spots a lowly human beat cop from the Vale P.D. across the lot, trying in vain to interrogate a captured White Fang grunt, flat on his ass and cuffed to a storefront bike rack. The officer’s spinning his wheels, caught up in useless routine questioning that the manic caracal faunus shouts down with bark and bluster. What was his name, _Callas something-or-other?_ The mask makes identification harder, but the gauged ears on either side are a dead giveaway; he’d been a fairly new find, only recruited in the last year and a half, after a rally-turned-riot down past Shire. A hot-tempered coward with eyes only for power, perfect for Adam’s vision. _A show of that power, and the guy_ _’ll brea_ _k._

_Just act like **Him.**_

As Blake approaches, the flummoxed officer begins to wave his scroll full of useless notes her way, warding her off, but before he can start his spiel, the grunt cackles wildly: “Been a long time, _traitor!_ Have fun playing schoolgirl while WE actually fought for the cause?”

Blake strides closer, silent, unblinking in her unimpressed stare.

With no immediate reaction to get his jollies, _Callas-something-or-other_ keeps at it with the needles. “Admit it, you never had the guts to do what’s necessary, a coward just like your parents! You just wanted that good Taurus dick, you shallow little who--”

Blake’s booted heel slams into the beige brick behind his head, hard enough to crack in a spray of gravel, half an inch away from giving the other faunus a fresh new piercing in his upper set of ears.

Now, as for the rookie officer, it’s not exactly by-the-book procedure to allow a random, unidentified, armed and violent stranger, _presum_ _ably_ a huntress-in-training, to interfere with an official police interrogation. However, he is but a mortal man, with a spouse, a child on the way, and most importantly, no aura. He can’t exactly be judged for stepping back, especially in the face of a dead-eyed, bloodied warrior who climbed right off an operating table and immediately kicked back into high gear. He keeps his opinions to himself.

“The rally point,” Blake states, not asks, _states._ It’s a foregone conclusion, they’re only beating around the bush.

“F-fuck you…! What, are you working with the _cops_ now, too? Adam was _RIGHT_ about you!”

_**Everything. You. Love.** _

Blake’s eyes come _so,_ _so_ _close_ to flaring red with a familiar semblance not her own – _Gambol Shroud_ is unsheathed with an echoing _**shiiiiiing**_ and slung to poise its edge tenderly, sweetly, against the radical’s carotid artery. She doesn’t ask again.

“ _Xi…!_ Shit, _Camp Xi,_ it’s the only clearing big enough for the ships! Crazy bitch!”

She’s done with them, now. Without a second look spared, or a response to the warbling _“Ma’am…_ _Wait, m_ _a’am!”_ following in her wake, Blake sheathes her weapon and spins away, disappearing into the crowd of rescuers and rescuees. Her course is clear, and it’s only for a short second that she pauses, glances westward, towards the docks. She could still try. She could go, disappear. She could--

 _But she can’t run this time, she can’t. He’ll always follow. He’ll always find her, wherever she goes._ _He won’t stop, so neither can she._ _No one else can be hurt because of her. She has to_ _end this._

Three stories above, an energetic blur with a monkey’s tail zips from rooftop to rooftop. They stop for a moment, scanning the area, but… don’t seem to catch anything of interest, not what they had an implacable feeling they might find. Oh well. Without further ado, they scamper on. _West. To the ships._ _To Haven._

Three stories below, Blake pilfers a handful of bandages and auto-injectors from an open plastic tub by the supply dump, orients herself with the cardinal directions, and begins to walk. _N_ _ortheast._ _To her duty._ _To her penance._

* * *

And it’s a _long_ walk through the Forever Fall.

Longer still, when she’s treading miles of memories at the same time. Many of the White Fang’s encampments in Vale spaced themselves at regular intervals within striking distance of the SDC’s most frequented cross-country shipping lines. Camp Xi was no exception, and that leaves her walking the rail. Walking that dividing line that split her from her former love, her current quarry, that day on the train. The day she could no longer bear his bloodlust with head bowed in deference.

_Ironic, that she’s the one out for blood, now._

Had she turned on him then, and fought, and put him down on that train, even just left him to die at the hands of the mechs rather than provide support… Had she been quick to violence, so much more violence in the future could be averted… Would the world really be better off if those were her guiding impulses, rather than to run, run, always run? Will the world be better off, after what she yet plans to do?

In an effort to pry herself from her thoughts, she tries to check her scroll along the way, but that’s hardly of help. No friendly messages, no confirmations of safety. Just stacks upon stacks of bolded **EMERGENCY** alerts, blinking exclamation points and dead bars indicating limited service, a loss of connection to the intercontinental function of the CCTS.

Temptation overcomes her, and she opens Team RWBY’s group chat to a backlog of cheerful messages, from the nights before the Fall. Back when they were celebrating Vytal. Back when they were eager, and hopeful, and happy. Seeing it all practically scalds her; she stuffs the thing back into her pocket.

Should she even try to call them? Would Ruby have awakened from… whatever she did last night, at the tower? Has Weiss passed out of range by now, across the borders to Atlas? Would Yang even want to speak to her again, to the one responsible for her pain? No. Maybe in a few days, when she’s accomplished her mission, when she has something to report.

_She can’t go crawling back, can’t ask them to tolerate her, can’t risk spreading her poison. Not until it’s over. Not until it is done._

Blake breaks from the beaten path along the shipping rail and ducks into the teeming crimson forest, creeping carefully under the cover of treetops as – _sure enough_ – hijacked airships sweep in from above, marking her path back to the old encampment. She is just another shadow in the woods, as she clambers up to a suitable perch, a vantage in the hills just above the landing site.

Another ship skims low and rustles up a storm of leaves around her. She can’t see _Him_ yet.

But she must be patient. She must be vigilant. She _knows_ she can’t win against him, one on one, not in this condition, not with all he holds over her head. And so, she resolves, this won’t be an honorable mission, no duel on even terms. A vendetta. Everything High Leader Khan taught them, everything _H_ _e_ taught her must be put to use. Every skill for guerrilla warfare against a vastly superior force, every strategy honed against the oppressive human-supremacist establishment, every tactic to take down the Schnee Dust Company. All to be turned against one of their own gone rogue.

The flurry of falling leaves drift to speckle the surface of a small creek below, a fork off the nearby estuary. Blake drops from her treebranch in silence, and wades into the water. She drinks, but that is not her purpose there: It’s further along, the landing of rich river-mud, into which she squats and begins to apply a thin coating rubbed over her skin. The same with crushed leaves, the dead grass.

 _Wash off the clinging smoke and death of Vale. Cover her scent. Become untraceable. Stalking a camp full of faunus, each with heightened senses from their heritage, is another league beyond hunting humans. Can’t_ _allow_ _any_ _canine faunus_ _to_ _track her. Can’t let_ _ **Him**_ _smell her bloody intent on the wind._

_She’ll go back. She’ll find them all again, her family, her loved ones, once she’s done what’s necessary. Just a few days. She just needs… a few more days, right? Maybe a week or two to finish this. And then it will be safe._

**And then it will be** **done.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry this is so lame aaaaaaaaaahghghhhhhhhhhhhh


	3. Slow Recovery

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Back in the present, the Bees begin to fill in the gaps together, and take steps towards recovery -- inside and out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BEHOLD! Another lackluster addition to a Bee Fic! ...apologies, as usual.

“It… didn’t end up being that simple, obviously,” Blake mumbles, her upper-left ear furling in at the tip, her right twinging with pain inside its little bandaged cocoon.

The waiting room of the Taupe Clinic down in the city of Patch is quiet, if sanitized and stuffy, empty but for the two huntresses and an indifferent old man on the other end, content to ignore the dramatic tale and focus on the local sports report. After picking up some essentials – _namely, fitting clothes and a scroll repair for Blake in spite of her protests about not being allowed to pay_ – Taiyang swung them all by the doctor’s in search of specialized aid for Blake’s feline ear. Yang didn’t have to stay. She didn’t have to come into the back with her, either, sit close-by as the graying faunus doctor cleaned and closed the sensitive tissue. No one questioned her.

Tai’s dirty old rattletrap of a truck, traded down from the unofficial ‘Team STRQ family minivan’ of ages past, has yet to return from his grocery run to pick the girls up. As such, Blake and Yang finally find themselves a moment with nothing else to do but talk. Not like that morning, where the fact they’d awakened warm and snug on the couch, having tightly entangled against one another in their sleep, embarrassed them both into silence all throughout breakfast.

“His airship finally came from one of the coastal camps the next day, so I could only guess he was planning to consolidate. Once I confirmed a visual on Adam, he was doing a headcount so they could rendezvous--”

 _“Blake…”_ Yang blurts out.

The faunus trails off, turning to her partner with wide-eyed worry. From where she sits, on Yang’s right, the brawler’s missing arm seems to stretch out a yawning chasm between them.

“I don’t-- I don’t want to talk about _him_ right now.”

Blake winces. _Of course she doesn’t. Why did she think she should even mention **his** name? She should have just lied about where she was all this time. She shouldn’t be here. She doesn’t deserve this--_

“I want to talk more about _you._ The rest can wait,” Yang continues, reaching across with her left and resting it on Blake’s knee in an attempt at reassurance. The discomfort in her interjection had already been enough, so seeing it matched on Yang’s face is even further reason for the faunus to… skip ahead some.

“Oh-- Right, I… yeah. We can… get to that later. So, after I…” Blake hitches up, right before she backslides into the _Bad Subject,_ and abbreviates it.

“When _it was done,_ I… I finally felt like I could… _apologize._ Like I could come back. And the Grimm would be closing in, soon, but… I still had to gather those things before I left, as… some kind of _proof.”_

Blake falters there, struggling not to get stuck in the memory. This isn’t the time.

“Took care of the Grimm, then just… started west, trying for any port town I could find. Found the first boat bound for Patch, paid them with what I scraped together from the camps so I could ride along with the cargo. Once we hit the dock, I just tried asking around about your dad, about a huntsman professor at Signal, like you always said… The storm was starting, and people were scattering to head home, so I didn’t have time for the whole story. Just told them I was one of his students and they believed me, pointed me along. I drew some more Ursa on the way, but I don’t even remember the fight… My aura wasn’t back up, but I’m still here, so…”

The whole story through, Yang… wants to, she wants to ask, and yet she can’t. It chills her, strips away all her months of ‘recovery’ and leaves her quaking again, to fully remember that man, that short-lived duel… But Blake went against him, alone, faced their shared personal demon. And she wants to know how, wants to know more about her partner and all she endured, but she _just can’t yet._

So, she squeezes Blake’s knee. Smiles wanly at her. Waits for her to continue.

“...Yang, I’m just-- I’m sorry, I’m so sorry--”

“I don’t want to hear it,” Yang finds herself saying rather more sternly than intended, and the faunus predictably flinches – both her ears flitting high, with the wounded twin twitching in pain. Realizing her wording wasn’t going to squeeze these sticky, gunky, confusing feelings out, she sucks in a breath and tries again.

“If… you being sorry is what made you disappear… if you needing to, like, _‘apologize’_ is what made you go through all that, instead of just staying – Instead of finding us… then I don’t want you to _be sorry. Blake,_ I want someone NOT to leave me for once. All I want is for you to be here, and be okay, not just disappear again.”

Blake cuts in in a rush, eyes taking on a glint just short of feral in their desperation. “I won’t--! I won’t, Yang, I don’t… I never should have gone, I know, but I didn’t know what to do to keep you safe, to keep me safe, and I panicked, but… This is my home, now.” Wait, that sounds… awfully _forward._ Blake reels back on her wording and tweaks it, “With Team RWBY, or what’s left of it here, I mean…”

No, she doesn’t mean it _quite_ like that. She means more, and on some subconscious level, they’re both acutely aware. For a covert agent and saboteur, her bluffing skills in the face of Yang Xiao Long are akin to a chocolate-smeared child insisting they didn’t touch the brownie batter.

Yang meanwhile remains only half-convinced, weighed upon by precedent and doubt, the dread of trusting her hopes. “Right, well… at least until you need to go back to your family.”

“No! I can’t just… Even if I _went_ home, they wouldn’t want to see me! Yang, I’m a failure to them, I’m a murderer…! The organization they built from the ground up became something they hated, and I was a part of that – and there’s no place for me in the Fang, either; no telling whether Auntie Sienna-- Ugh. Whether High Leader Khan would even want me back, or if she thinks I’m a traitor, too…”

Being but a plain old Patch girl with little knowledge of the White Fang’s inner workings or her partner’s parents’ disposition, Yang hangs back, not wanting to toss false sentiment on the fire. She’s grown allergic to false promises over recent months, and wouldn’t wish to inflict that on her friend.

Blake clambers back out of the guilt-ridden tangent, and back onto the guilt-ridden topic at hand.

“So… I’ll be here with you, however long you want me. You-- You gave your arm so I could live… So let me be your arm from now on,” Blake says earnestly, subconsciously channeling her years of tawdry romance novels for the corniest phrasing possible in her clumsy vow of loyalty.

It’s then that a large shadow passes over the entranceway, accompanied with some strained engine sputtering, as Taiyang’s truck rolls into view on the curb. It’s a pretty good escape from the weight of the conversation for Yang, given she… _really_ didn’t know what to say to that kind of declaration – _not without unveiling another sticky, confusing feeling she’s working on_ – nor whether she could even _believe_ it anymore. No matter how much she wants to, and _gods,_ does she ever.

Because Blake’s gone and stirred something inside her, and as she stands and shoulders the door open for them both before the faunus can step in and overdo it on the chivalry, she replies, vaguely: “Maybe you won’t have to be.”

Blake’s entire ride back to the cabin is spent in confusion, suspense, and silent gratitude that the cramped interior lets her be tightly smushed right up into her partner’s side the whole way home.

* * *

_“...Oh.”_

“Yeah.”

They stand together in Yang’s childhood bedroom, and Blake can’t even savor the sheer plethora of secrets and discoveries about her partner’s past to be found all around her. She can’t look through the books on the shelf to scan for familiar titles, or through her closet for new outfits she’s never seen her partner wear.

Instead, she’s looking at Yang’s arm. Her _other_ arm. The one in the box laid out on her bed, the one she isn’t wearing.

_The one Yang needs because of her._

It’s fine Atlesian technology, that much can be said even at first glance. A sleek silvery thing, with dual ball joints and lightweight armoring for combat, and a thin, unobtrusive seam at the connection point. A far cry from the bolts and exposed wiring of Mercury Black’s prosthesis. There are no obnoxious emblems or slogans she can see branded anywhere across the surface, like most consumer prosthetics from Atlas’ major biotech firms, either: This has to have been a high-end custom job.

“So... have you tried it yet?”

It’s a stupid question, and she knows it by the time it passes her lips; there’s still a thin plastic protective film over some of the external components, meant to be peeled off for first usage, and the packing foam is undisturbed.

“No… not yet,” says Yang, subconsciously reaching to rub at her stump. Her lips draw out thin, and she braces, because she KNOWS Blake is going to ask _why,_ and for that, she has a million answers, and no answers at all. She’s never bothered to put those flickers of angry, remorseful, terrified, unsettled emotion into intelligible thought before, just had them floating around as smoky wisps. Worse yet, some of them are as blunt as _‘Because of you,’_ and she doesn’t _mean_ that, and never would. Her brain thought those thoughts, even though they weren’t her own, and now when Blake asks her _why--_

“Do you want to try it on?”

 _That wasn’t ‘why,’_ Yang thinks. _That wasn’t ‘what were you waiting for, all this time, you self-pitying dumbass.’ That was, ‘let me help.’_

“...Yang?” Blake asks, stepping around to partly face her, “Sorry, I was just curious, I won’t pressure you. I just thought, if you did, I could… help you put it on.”

Squeezing lightly at the scarred dead-end on her right side, Yang dodges Blake’s gaze, and the offer as well: “You don’t have to. It’s probably weird enough to see it, let alone touch.” _She doesn’t need to be pitied, don’t pity her..._

Finishing her movement to fully round on Yang, Blake shoves past her hesitation to resume their casual ease of touch from back at Beacon, reaching out to cup over the hand Yang’s using to hide her stump. Her tone, when she finally speaks, isn’t pitying, it’s _pleading._

“Yang, please… I’m – I’m the reason it’s like this.” Her rationalization of the very-irrational, subconscious _need_ to do this, to help in this very _specific, metaphorical_ way, is hard to parse without sounding obsessive, but still she tries: _“_ I’m the reason it’s missing, so please, let me replace it…?” Her eyes finally link with Yang’s lilacs. “Let me fix what I did.”

“...You already are.” _She doesn’t mean the arm._

Before the pair can even approach the cybernetic itself, there’re prerequisites to be addressed. The package had also included a cardboard carton less glamorous than the highly-stylized case, which Blake peers at curiously. Golden eyes skim a short burst of chickenscratch scrawled across an office note taped to the side, the sort of horrible handwriting that you’re only legally allowed to use if you’re a doctor.

“Okay, it says… before application of the…” Blake tilts her head towards the cyber-arm and flicks her unbandaged ear in gesture. “And weekly, for the next few months, you’ll have to take… I can’t even read the name, some generic pharma name. _Neurop-a-something?_ Supposed to stave off transplant rejection syndrome? This… ‘Doc P’ says it won’t conflict with your existing medication…”

Yang tiredly growls at the thought of adding MORE to her daily regimen. “So, Nurse Belladonna, how many more pills do I have to tack on?”

“Huh? They’re not pills.”

 _Oh, grapes,_ thinks Yang, as Blake withdraws a thin white cylinder, covered in little indents and perforations, a pull-out plunger on one end, a nose for a needle at the other.

“Oh, grapes,” says Yang, out loud this time. Because she really feels the need to emphasize.

“Not a fan of shots?”

She’s had her _arm_ cut off, she’s not exactly afraid of a teensy little poke, but Yang’s still never been a fan of the stabby-pinchy sensation, especially after how many’d already been jabbed into her earlier on in her recovery. “I’m not scared, they just suck, that’s all.”

Blake rolls the injector in her fingers. “Yeah. I never liked using these sorts of things, either.” Blake immediately regrets leaving a loose thread for Yang to tug, and Yang in turn buzzes with the urge to tug it. They... move on.

“Said once it’s in your system you can take it anywhere, but the first should be near the… um. The point of contact,” Blake proceeds, eyes low and locked on the nefarious pokey-jabby device, save a shy look up to wordlessly ask Yang for permission. The blonde just leans out her shoulder.

“Go ahead. Hit me, Blakey.”

 _‘Blakey’_ is fully-aware Yang’s only dredging up that cheery nickname she’s nitpicked since their first semester as a cover-up, but she can’t… she can’t help but feel a ping of happy chemicals courtesy of her hypothalamus – it feels normal, almost, feels _right,_ feels like when they were close. When Adam’s sword hadn’t cut an arm-shaped rift between them. _When she hoped they could be more..._

Filling her lungs and holding it, Blake carefully reaches for Yang’s wrapped stump, keeping the remainder of her right arm steady as she aligns the injector just above the bandages. Her thumb maintains a holding pattern over the button, and her own face prickles with dread as if she were the one about to feel a pinch. _It’s just a shot, I’m not… really hurting her, I’m helping, right?_

“Remnant to Belladonna, come in?” Yang teases.

 _For Brothers’ sake._ Blake presses the plunger and there’s a hiss, first from the device and then from her partner as the chemical compound’s shot into her bloodstream, ready to set the table.

“Phew… And hey, I didn’t even cry, like when I was five and getting flu shots. Y’proud of me?”

“Sure. I’m in _total awe._ Your unparalleled courage makes me _swoon,_ Xiao Long.”

...Blake missed this.

Emancipating the prosthetic from its packing and protective wrap with a crinkling of plastic, Yang grabs the artificial limb by the hand and pulls, while Blake holds down the box and gives the bicep a tug to pry it free from the snug foam. The thing comes out with a pop, Blake scrambling to tidy up the mess and look for any loose components or instructions, as Yang stands there, swinging her loose, limp cybernetic in front of herself. She feels like one of her busted old action figures from when she was little.

“Okay, I found the manual.”

Blake’s proactivity calls her back to attention, and Yang slings her limp metal limb over her shoulder as she rejoins the faunus. _Maybe,_ a voice in Yang’s head reasons, _she shouldn’t be playing so recklessly with a highly-specialized piece of engineering,_ but hey, it’s her arm now, isn’t it? She can be as stupid as she wants. _She was with the last one._

Then she remembers it’s supposed to have a shotgun in it, and sobers up.

“Looks like… your operation should have already prepped everything where nerves and aura conductivity’s concerned,” Blake continues, leafing through the pages of tiny print, “So I think we just… snap it on?” She shrugs. “It should activate for first-time calibration when you’re pressed against the sensor and it can pick up your aura.”

Seems simple enough. “Cool, plug and play,” Yang says blithely, hoping Blake can’t notice the subtle trembling of her hand as she offers the cybernetic to the faunus.

Blake’s eyes are keen, but she makes no comment. She merely adjusts the metal limb upright and waits for Yang to finish unraveling the bandages around the end of her stump. Holds it close, and… waits. And waits. And glances at Yang, who glances back, and away, and back, and--

“Not again, gods, just do it alr-- _Gah!_ ”

The connector plate gives a staticky prickle as Blake flinches and unintentionally _jams_ the thing up onto Yang’s waiting bicep, the seam clenching snug to the blonde’s scarred skin as it fastens on. Despite her outburst, she hadn’t braced herself for the sensation – like the phantom limb she’s suffered for months is now flickering in and out of physical space, her aura attempting to extend itself outward and into the prosthetic’s conduit while limited sensory data from the connective circuitry strains to make the jump to her nerve endings.

It’s a _trip,_ and Yang’s brain boils over with the familiar-yet-foreign stimulus, causing her to lurch forward and catch herself against Blake’s shoulders.

_With both hands._

Yang’s head darts back up, her eyes momentarily meeting Blake’s and sharing their mutual surprise before both sets flick to the shiny silver arm now clutching the faunus’ left shoulder in a vicegrip. Blake doesn’t even notice that it’s starting to hurt.

“Did you just… Yang?”

“It… it _works.”_

Ponderously, Yang pulls away from her partner, cycling her new substitute limb through a series of stretches and flexing its fingers. Fresh out of the box, the servo movements are almost noiseless, the low whirring only audible thanks to the awed silence the pair share watching Yang run the limb through various exercises.

“Just like that?” Blake asks, circling around to possibly find the manual again. She doesn’t quite know what she was expecting, maybe something more emotionally momentous than a sudden stumble and a reflex response, something that finally ejects the burden of blame she’s taken upon her shoulders all at once. She can’t deny it feels wonderful to see her partner growing enthused, rushing around the room to lift and poke and twist every stray object she can safely fit in her sleek, chromed-up fingers. It _is_ wonderful, but it’s still…

“What is it?” Yang asks, and Blake jerks from her reverie to find her friend at the bookshelf, hefting an unwieldy stack of comics and paperbacks a dozen volumes high, testing the limb’s strength and balance.

 _No,_ Blake thinks to herself, _don’t ruin Yang’s moment. Don’t be selfish, don’t make it about you. She_ schools her face into a smile, not too tricky given she is legitimately relieved about the situation all the same, and makes a play to keep the tone lighthearted. “Just nice to see you, uh…” _Gods,_ this is going to make her sound like an idiot. “ _Armed_ and ready.”

There’s a thud and a rustling of laminated paper as half the teetering tower of books hits the floor and scatters. Blake tenses immediately – _jaw shut, tongue pulled away from teeth, eyes closed, head ducked_ – until she hears a sharp snort and the remaining literature not-yet-fallen is carelessly chucked onto the bed with the rest of the mess, Yang rushing forward and--

 _And wrapping Blake up in a tight hug, laughing stupidly all the while._ “You are SUCH a dork.”

Blake kind of wants to cry. _She doesn’t deserve this. She wants this. She needs this. Doesn’t deserve it at all, but Yang is **holding** her and it’s just like before and just like she always hoped it would be, and..._

“I'm… glad to be of service,” she manages to mumble, her heart twisting up as the urge to fling her arms around the blonde’s shoulders and stay there for hours strikes, and strikes _hard._ It doesn’t matter her bruised ribs are aching, doesn’t matter the excitement made her ears flit high and tweak the wounded one. She could stay like this forever. But she’s already eating more than her fill, here – she can’t risk _that,_ can’t risk losing _this._

The embrace breaks, as do tiny fragments of their respective hearts in doing so, but the _Utter Normalcy_ of the moment must be maintained. The long silence after, though, is strangely peaceful. True, each huntress has so many words to say, and all the time to say it, but they both plop back onto the patches of Yang’s bed left uncluttered, still not brave enough to jump the chasm.

The companionable silence is pleasant, for a time, but has to be cut short before awkwardness encroaches. Blake’s eyes – enduring a herculean effort not to lock onto Yang’s relaxed smile – instead fall on the collection of discarded books on the bed. She can pry a little into Yang’s old interests, right? That’s just normal friend stuff. Chat for gal pals, hanging in one of their rooms. All well and good ‘til she spots a familiar dust-jacket.

“Hey… That’s–”

It’s ‘ _The Man With Two Souls.’_ And beneath it, when she slides the first aside, a copy of ‘ _Ninjas Of Love: Gaiden – Kunoichi Kinbaku-bi.’_ **Oh**. _Oh, **gods.** Has Yang read these?_

“ _Man With Two Souls?_ Yeah, I… spent most of the time in bed up here, the first few months,” Yang admits, reaching for the first of the books and flipping it in her hands. Now that she has hands, plural, with which to flip things. “I hadn’t gotten started on the copy you lent me back at Beacon, so… When Dad had us down in town to get my painkillers one day, we swung by the library. Had to do something if I was going to stay cooped up.” It’s plain to see on her face just how conflicted she’d been, but Yang isn’t keen to lose this calm they’ve built together, isn’t going to say, _‘But I couldn’t start it for the longest time, because it hurt to think of you.’_

Blake knows there’s more to it, but can tell it’s sharp, and jagged, and she’d cut herself trying to pry it out, only to find it’s something she already knew. Instead, she fights on, her and Yang, together, battling for this chance of relaxing conversation. “Did, uh. Did you… like it? I wasn’t really sure if it was your usual fare, I mean, I didn’t know what sorts of things you read outside of sharing Ruby’s weapon mags back then...”

“No, yeah, it was pretty neat,” Yang replies, “Kinda high-concept there in the middle, and I still don’t get how a soulmate is supposed to share your aura, like, wouldn’t that be super-inconvenient as a huntress? Imagine if I got hit, and _your_ aura broke, it would suck!”

_Blake does imagine. Blake imagines herself in this theoretical scenario. This theoretical scenario in which she’s Yang’s soulmate, a scenario which Yang just casually described to her as if it were nothing. Soulmates. Entwined, forever, across universes, timelines, every alternate branch. Always together._

Yang doesn’t notice her partner’s sudden thousand-yard stare and keeps rattling on. “What, you want to sit and go over the whole entire story with me?” she jokes, tossing the hardcover to her other side. “We can make it a thing – Blake and Yang, the Team Bumblebee Book Club.”

Snapping back into focus before her cover’s blown, Blake swiftly snatches the closest book at hand and nods in agreement. “Pff, definitely, can’t wait to do a full breakdown of everything in…”

_Ninjas Of Love: Gaiden. Damn it. Why’d she have to pick this one up? Her face is on **fire.**_

Leaning over, Yang discovers the root of Blake’s blush, and starts to run a little pink in the cheeks herself. “ _Ooooh,_ uh. Yeah, that was another one I… since I remember you were always reading those _Ninja_ books, so when I saw them at the library, I just thought, heh, why not see what the buzz is about? The original was one thing, pretty decent, but then I found _that…_ Sorta hard to follow since the characters were all different, and– _”_

“T-that’s because it’s the second of the spinoffs, not part of the main continuity, and it branches from the third book, not the first,” Blake jumps in, tone straining to be entirely informational and not at all betray her absolute horror, intrigue, and humiliation that Yang has actually _read_ some of the… very, very niche, mature ‘subculture’ romance the faunus surreptitiously hoarded. ‘Filth,’ as Ruby had called it once.

Yang can’t help her snickering: Blake’s face right now is a riot. “Yeah, okay. Well, it was still pretty _interesting,_ if you ask me. I can imagine why it was your favorite, even if I just skipped around to the good bits. _Kiiiinda_ surprised our tiny little library even kept that kind of thing on the shelves...”

“Oh, gods, you don’t have to tease me like this.” Blake stretches towards the back and snatches up a pillow from the far end of the bed. “Now that you’ve got two arms again, I have _zero_ qualms about smacking you.”

The Sunny Dragon’s grin is almost feral now, and she quirks a brow, leveling a smug stare Blake’s way. “Who were _you_ identifying with? Grandmaster _Himawari?_ Or her dear faithful acolyte _Kuromi?_ ” She rests her fleshy hand over her heart and begins to quote, in ridiculously accented soliloquy: _“But my Mistress, my heart is already ensnared, just as you’ve captured my body in these webs of rope–”_

The pillow **_fwaps_** into Yang’s face with all the force a flustered faunus can muster, and the victim of the attack erupts into a bout of stupid laughter, muffled by the material. Blake goes in for another strike, but Yang combat rolls out of the way – _knocking books and packing pieces alike onto the floor with a loud clatter_ – to nab her own pillow and **_whumf_** Blake in the side. Chaos ensues, both grown, battle-hardened huntresses devolving into the giggling children they barely got a chance to be, swatting each other with pillows shouting ridiculous _(if not also a tad salacious)_ lines by fictional love-ninjas, making such a ruckus Taiyang even has to come up and check on them, smirking and shaking his head.

Blake _really,_ _really_ missed this. This is what she fought for: this friendship, this warmth and light.

_This is what she **killed** for._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hope that was half-decent aaaaahhhghghhh i dunno aaaah.
> 
> Do you know how hard it is to NOT just have them make up in 0.5 seconds and start kissing? Do you? Somehow I overcame the great temptation to throw pacing and semi-realistic development to the wind and have them confessing without at least a TINY delay to sort themselves out! AND FOR WHAT!?
> 
> (...She says, whilst wailing and gnashing her teeth with every passing episode of Volume 8 that goes by without the Bees reuniting and finally kissing. Because. We've waited SO LONG.)


	4. War Journals

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Being an account of some among the many trials and tribulations of Adam Taurus' White Fang cell, in the months following The Fall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> another dumb edgy flashback. i'm still not a writer.

Week One – Camp Xi

“Damn it!”

The panicky, overworked White Fang pilot slams his wrench against the outer hull of yet another hijacked transport airship, glaring down at yet another gods-damned mess. There’s no explanation for it! Fuel and coolant levels were checked and re-checked daily, both before AND after the Vale raid. System integrity diagnostics, same routine. Only a few of the ships were ever deployed afterwards, and just on short skips to the farthest camps and back!

There should have been dust enough for full charges in all four engines of these hunks of junk, and half a tank coolant, minimum. Instead: Mere grains and residue, overheating turbines, barely enough juice to make it a few miles in any direction, and that’s IF the things hadn’t been melted and warped past the point of uselessness. How badly did you have to screw up to let this happen to ALL the ships on-site!?

 _And they need to move;_ it’s been six days since Beacon, and a freelancing guild huntsman from Vale was already caught snooping around and got put down just the evening prior, with evidence on his scroll pointing straight to their last-known coordinates. Those loyal in the Mistral Brotherhood are still expecting their arrival within the fortnight.

“Who,” grits Adam Taurus, dragging a boot through a leaked splotch of oil in the dirt, “was the last technician? Where is the man responsible for yesterday’s maintenance?”

The pilot gestures with his spanner towards another faunus in the surrounding crowd. He can’t even stammer, “Well, I think--” before a shot rings in the clearing, their leader’s gun-scabbard putting a round clean through the incompetent’s mask.

“ _Ah, sh--_ Sir! What about… what about the transports? We’ll need to fix them, we can’t just stay here! Any longer and they’ll have us before we can get to Anima! ...Sir?”

The bull’s blood buzzes in the fingers of his sword-hand, begging to answer the insubordination. _But no, not yet. One is an apt example. Two so soon is wasteful spending._

“Have you forgotten how to **_walk?_** ...We move on foot.” Adam spins on his heel, turning his back on the field of very expensive airship scrap and stomping off to his tent. “Salvage them for spare parts, then move to break camp. _Now._ ”

The amassed group of bystanders slowly dissipates, most heading to begin gathering up their things, leaving the engineers to the haphazard disassembly and a pair dragging their unfortunate comrade off for a rushed, unceremonious burial.

(In the far distance of the forest, a shadow shoulders its pack and prepares as well.)

* * *

Week Five – 3 miles west of Sapton

A quarter of the consolidated Vale Brotherhood forces, depleted. Whether it be capture by law enforcement, wayward Grimm drawn to the festering stress, or simple desertion, all have continually been bleeding Adam’s camp of combat-viable soldiers.

Even among those still serving active duty, capability has been reduced by incidental injuries, equipment failures, accidents with poacher’s traps among the trees, unpleasant but unsurprising.

Until the ambushes begin in earnest.

It starts with a few missing night watchmen, on lonely patrols along their defensive perimeter. Only the faintest signs of a struggle, if any at all, near their last known posts.

It could still be Grimm, Adam’s lieutenants conclude, and arrange patrols to be in pairs for the foreseeable future. A stopgap solution that works well enough until those very pairs turn up missing or split, leaving behind a single unconscious, aura-broken soldier who can’t remember a thing except a rush of leaves, a violent blow from behind, and silence.

By the time Adam personally mandates extra shifts to have entire trios on hand for every position, the attacks have slowed, and his agents free to spy on the nearby towns relay finding many of the missing locked up in the local jails rather than rent apart by an Ursa.

_It matters little that they still live – They’re not useful like this, and latent fear has already taken root._

Shipments along the Sanus Continental Rail have upped their arsenals, especially along the routes crossing and edging around the Forever Fall. Never is the Fang’s gathered intelligence accurate; each time soldiers are readied for their raids on a supposedly safe target, the train beds are crammed with an army of their own, posted Paladin-290’s for every other cargo car bearing the brand of the Schnees.

They’re being boxed in, their movements seemingly leaked to the local guards and huntsmen the very same day they’re planned. Increased patrols and security checkpoints in the cities, airship terminals and hangars sealed up tight before they can hijack a transport, docks and train stations on high alert, guards running ID scans, sometimes full biometrics. Even within their own camp network, communication is inconsistent with so many arbitrary power failures in the radio antennas.

They’re being held in Sanus, that much Adam knows for certain. Someone, some agency or group, is clearly trying to prevent their leave. It can’t be the Huntsman’s Guild, they wouldn’t have sway to direct and organize the private corporations, and Vale’s regional government can’t possibly have pinned them down so quickly. _A mole in the organization, maybe? More traitors to weed out?_ This can’t go on any longer – his cell _MUST_ move to Mistral if the succession plan is to take place. He’ll find out who’s hampering them, it’s just a matter of time.

(A shadow rustles within the large pile of dead leaves behind the comms tent.)

* * *

Week Ten – Along the Deer Run River

Adam Taurus tightly grips the hilt of his sword, his irritation seeping down _Wilt’s_ blade and dripping into the dirt.

“...Empty out your canteens.”

Even factoring in the swaths of craven deserters in recent days and their storehouse supply, it still takes a large potable water source to maintain an encampment of their size for any extended duration, and few locations provide the necessary environment whilst remaining safe from prying eyes and governmental scrutiny. There’s only so much their water tower can collect and siphon from the rain and snow, and that was before the thing catastrophically toppled to the ground a week prior. _Just bad wood,_ the lieutenants said. _It must have been bad wood._

At dawn, his quartermaster had reported a dead stag, rotting profusely where it lies wedged and soaking beneath the head of the nearby stream, contaminating it. Expertly stripped of the bulk of its viable meat, a single, clean bullet hole marks the skull, a quick, seemingly painless death. Within the yawning carcass, a thin smattering of spent civilian-grade dust granules, having generated low additive warmth and greatly accelerated bacterial decay beyond any natural timetable.

The same assessment can be made for the many other dead forest creatures dredged up from their highly-prized water source, as well as their contribution to the genesis of the suspicious mossy film on the surface.

This would, of course, explain several days of increasingly widespread sickness sweeping Adam’s encampment, spanning from simple nausea to vomiting and other unpleasant methods of bodily evacuation.

While nothing that proves fatal, operations grind to a near-standstill with so few fighters at full strength. In the end, the most that can be done is enacting a boil order until the group is stable enough to relocate, in light of their ‘misplaced’ stock of water purification tablets and filters. Maybe they were just forgotten at one of their last camps when they bugged out. Just another unfortunate accident.

With the steady advance of the season, the scarcity of wild game for fresh food will only worsen. The existing stockpile is only going to last so much longer, as well, before having to exclusively rely on their remaining supply of meager, unpalatable canned rations and whatever they can steal on the fly. At least, until someone can fix the fault in the refrigeration unit that’s spoiled everything from meat to their fresh fruit and dairy.

They’re hungry, they’re thirsty, they’re feverish and scared. And they know they’re being hunted.

(Deeper downwind in the dark of the woodlands, a shadow enjoys a breakfast of smoked venison jerky.)

* * *

Week Thirteen – Ranger’s Hollow

Climatologists initially predicted this would be a reasonably light winter. Then again, they’d done so long _before_ the aggregation and flow of global meteorological data was severed.

The cold snap hits Vale like a hammer-blow, giving the nation’s city-dwellers a nice, white Winter Solstice to try and take their minds off The Fall, with all the powdery snow their little hearts could desire. The rural communities aren't at all enthused about the weather, and the vagrant camp of Fang extremists even less so.

 _“What do you mean, ‘all of them?!’”_ barks a predictably furious Adam Taurus, through clenched, chattering teeth. His posture is aggressive, even as he strains not to visibly shiver.

“That is, er, not – Not, ‘all’ all,” says the also-predictably fretful technician, a boar faunus well-aware of the job retention rates for his current position of employment. “Just the larger systems, for the command post, the mess tent, a few of the bunkhouses… The one in the weapons depot might still be viable?”

_It’s not; he’s already checked twice and the thing’s a total brick, but for Brothers’ sake, he has to say something to ease the bossman’s rage before his hand slides any closer to his scabbard._

The only Solstice present given to Adam’s cell this year is the gift of broken heat generators – they must have been naughty, even coal would have been more useful. Every one of the heavy-duty units installed in the larger shelters has, by _complete coincidence,_ failed disastrously within a single day, overloading in a violent electrical sputter or belching thick clouds of smoke. A fair few of the portable units set up in the sleeping quarters remain, but many more depleted of dust, smashed, or missing outright.

“Who was on watch?! Give me names, bring them here! _Someone_ is going to give me _answers._ ”

Naturally, to add injury to insult, another two full crates worth of dust are missing from the storehouse, raw crystal _and_ powder. The camp’s fuel supply situation immediately plummets from precarious to outright perilous, and there’s much worse weather in store this season.

(A shadow wraps up tight in its shrouds, hidden in its well-heated burrow. It snows heavily this night.)

* * *

Week Sixteen – Great War Ruins

_An eighth. A mere eighth of his soldiers remain, and that’s already accounting for the losses at Beacon._

Leaving his weapon at the entrance of the heavy canvas bath tent and stepping in from the snow, Adam Taurus strips down and pitches a few marble-sized chunks of diluted fire dust into the water to flare and heat it. _Damn the rationing, he needs this._ He sinks heavily into the water with a careless splash, soon pouring out a cup on the pile of smoldering rocks by the edge for more steam. As if it will even remotely ease his stress, cool his temper.

Outside the tent, a hunched and hooded White Fang grunt meanders in from the outskirts, garnering no attention at all from the posted guard detail as they settle on the nearby log bench. They withdraw a clay whetstone and a bottle from their pack, then reach out to snatch _Wilt & Blush_ from their perch beside the entryway.

This is nothing out of the ordinary. It’s always been expected for Adam to demand some lower-ranking member attend his weapon’s maintenance when he’s particularly stressed, and not a soul in the camp would claim their leader’s been of calm mind and sparkling disposition these days. So, the grunts get the work. They’d always crudely joked how he typically used to make that traitor slut of his _polish his weapon_ instead of them _,_ back before she abandoned the cause.

But, of course, _she’s_ gone now. It’s just a nameless, faceless, masked soldier who services his sword tonight. _Wilt’s_ blade gleams crimson in the light of the broken moon, its orbital fragments a few days from a full scatter. Brighter the sword shines, even, as the grunt begins to oil and grind away.

This is _nothing_ out of the ordinary. Nothing for the passing patrols to note.

Save for how the immaculate blade only seems to grow a fraction rougher and more brittle with every pass. Save for how the liquid tipped from the bottle doesn’t seem to be common oil, what with its acrid scent and lightly corrosive qualities. There must’ve been a material mix-up somewhere in the storehouse, that’s all.

To a trained expert, whether it be in bladecraft or blacksmithing, this simple accident would be considered a blasphemy. Doubly so, if one were to muse on the necessity of a substantially durable blade to a fighter whose semblance hinges upon using it to absorb attacks and store up a high concentration of energy.

Yet that’s of no concern to this uninteresting, nondescript grunt, who wipes down _Wilt’s_ moderately weathered length and sheathes it, dutifully replacing it right where it was found. And like a good, humble grunt, they take their leave in silence, never to disturb their glorious leader. Unnoticed, unseen, and easily forgotten, away into the frost-nipped woods.

Inside the bath tent, Adam draws up more steam, drags it into his lungs, punches it out in a feral growl. Enmity rolls off him like the sweat beading on his skin. He’s not a fool, not an idiot that can be played, not a stupid animal. He knows what’s been going on by now, of course he does.

“It’s _her,_ it’s always been _her..._ ” he mutters to himself, “ _She’s coming._ ”

(A shadow pauses in the brush, an ear flicks back towards the voice. And then it’s gone.)

* * *

Five Nights Ago – Leader’s Tent

_Adam Taurus is jerked awake to the reek of smoke, rattle of guns, and the roar of battle._

_She is here._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fgdsjhgfjjjjgthgfgghhh. i dunno. sorry about the lame edge again.  
> i know this one wasn't good but i couldn't really figure out how to add more to it without it seeming bloated or repetitive.  
> bees back to being bees next chapter i promise.  
> haaaaaaaa, god I'm a wreck. ha. haaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.


	5. Warming Up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A little bit of exercise, a little bit of fatherly teasing, and the girls get back into the swing of things.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> bweh. hope this is good enough to constitute... some... kind of enjoyable... something. ish.  
> compared to my dumb last fic, at least. or, uh. at all.  
> I could've had this out earlier AND kept my chapter buffer up if I hadn't wasted so much time on that instead aaaaghhhhhhh...  
> have some bumbling bees.

_“…As you can see here from the trail of carnage throughout the entire clearing which, we can only assume, was the center of the insurgent camp. With no agencies or licensed huntsmen taking claim for the attack or presenting proof for the bounty reward, current evidence seems to suggest longterm infighting within the group as the cause for the chaos. Again, for those of you just joining us, VNN has just confirmed: Adam Taurus, leader of the radical Vale Brotherhood cell of the White Fang responsible for enabling the Fall of Beacon, is dead.”_

“So… That was all you, huh?”

It’s kind of impressive, in a morbid way – seeing the sheer level of devastation her partner is capable of unleashing when set loose on a mission close to her heart. The camp looks like something out of those grainy Great War footage reels from Oobleck’s history classes, but to know it’s the work of just one girl?

_And she did it for you,_ Yang’s nosy inner voice reminds her. She hasn’t yet asked for the full story of that final confrontation, still isn’t sure she’s ready to hear about that monster directly, or watch him bear down on her partner again, even in her mind’s eye. But she can’t keep running from her curiosity forever; it’s the only part of the tale she’s yet to let Blake retell. _Maybe… maybe tonight._

When Yang glances over to meet Blake’s eyes, the faunus flushes a shade darker and turns back to the TV projection. “Um… Yeah. That’s… that was me,” she mumbles, distractedly, staring at the news airship’s overhead footage of the scene she left behind her not even a week ago. Familiar, but not – like memories belonging to a different person entirely, whatever person she’d been with her mind in such a desperate place.

There’s a lot for her to process all at once: The strangeness of seeing her personal warpath examined like a newsworthy event, the remorse for what brash lengths she undertook, and _now,_ a dumb, fizzy sort of _embarrassment_ at Yang seeing just how overboard she’d gone in avenging her. As if Blake had given her an obnoxiously personal holiday gift, rather than… well. Whatever _this_ is.

The pair sink back into silence as the footage shows the camera crew touching down amid the ruined tents and prefabs, zooming in on various blast craters and scorchmarks along the way. It’s fine, it keeps them from discussing the elephant in the room. Or the bull, as it were.

“Hey, girls! You ready?”

The bubble is popped as Taiyang returns from upstairs, blocking the screen as he crosses over on his way out the back door and signals them to follow. The pair simply shrug at one another and haul up from the couch, neither bothering to flick off the screen as they adjourn – _sometimes it’s best to leave it on for Zwei,_ Tai had said. _Makes him feel smart._ As the door pulls shut, the newscaster continues to sensationalize, words falling on the mostly-deaf ears of a dog not that keen on waking from his afternoon nap.

_“...still remain unable to contact the White Fang’s High Leader, Sienna Khan, for further comment on his actions, or the outcome. For VNN, this has been Lisa Lavender, signing off.”_

* * *

“Er… Mister Xiao Long, sir? Where’s your weapon?”

Taiyang finishes applying some simple wrappings to his hands and punches a fist into his opposite palm in a rather familiar warmup pose. “Aw, again with that? I’m telling you, just call me Tai! And I wouldn’t worry, we won’t need ‘em! No frills, no semblances, just a bit of classic sparring to feel things out. Gotta put that prosthetic through its paces.”

Oh, yep, there’s that pose again: Yang mimics her father and gives Blake a cockeyed look. “Yeah, now that Ruby’s not here to wave around her big dumb scythe, we’re doing it old-school, the way we used to!”

Already, Blake’s mind is cobbling together a scene of a young, scrappy Yang of years past, slugging it out with a dad twice her height. It is _very cute._

There’s little time to enjoy it, though: Yang squints at her and asks, “Waiiiit… If you still thought we’d be using our weapons, why didn’t you bring _Gambol Shroud?”_

_Right. About that._

“Oh. I thought I already mentioned – No, I guess not, since we never got to that part. She’s… broken, right now,” Blake admits quietly, eyes falling to the dirt and her one good feline ear curling down at the tip.

Yang drops the confident act for genuine concern in a heartbeat. “Since when?! Why didn’t you get it fixed when we were in town?” That tears it. She’s hearing the rest of the story tonight. _Everyone knows how important a huntress’ weapon is to her, what it symbolizes._

Taiyang claps, centering focus back to himself. “We can see about breaking out the tools later, and I can always drive you two down to Signal if you need to borrow the forge. But for now, we’re gonna make sure we aren’t tacking that new arm onto the repair order.” Rolling his shoulders, he drops into a defensive stance and beckons the girls. “So! Come at me!”

“How’re we taking turns?” Blake asks, stepping a pace back behind her partner. “Yang first, I guess?”

Tai just laughs. “Turns? Nah, no need for that. Me against the both of you’s pretty fair in my book, because YOU,” he points to Yang, “spent months getting rusty even before you had any metal on you TO rust.” The finger flicks to Blake. “And YOU aren’t primarily a hand-to-hand fighter like us. Not to mention the balance issues while your ear’s healing.” He taps a finger to his chin, scratching his goofy soul-patch. “Oh, and the fact that I’m pretty darn good, if I do say so myself. Been a long time since anybody knocked _me_ flat.”

“Ch’yeah, because you’ve been beating down your combat school freshmen,” Yang shoots back, recovering some of her moxie over the chance to knock some humility back into her dorky dad, despite her right side’s unwieldiness. “Not Beacon girls like me and Blake.” She gives the selfsame faunus a halfway-believable smirk and starts to circle around her father, picking her moment to charge on in.

The challenge doesn’t do a thing to chip away at Tai’s confidence, and he maintains his guard in Yang’s direction while keeping Blake in his peripheral. “The both of you got in ONE year, each. Me? I’m sitting on a solid four. Add the two of you together, ‘n I’ve _still_ got twice the ‘Beacon’ in me as–“

Dirt scrapes up in a plume as Yang rushes to make her play, her footwork still as nimble as ever, but the weight of her new right arm slowing down her low jab. It’s effortless for Tai to sidestep the first move, giving her a firm shove and sending her stumbling forward against a tree trunk on the edge of their invisible dojo.

The sight of Yang floundering her first strike zaps Blake with the realization she’s just been standing motionless this entire time, rather than readying for the situation. Seeing Yang take a hit (and not even a _hit_ hit) still squeezes something inside her chest that sends her frantically launching into the fray as well.

Unfortunately, her impulsive choice of maneuver is a leaping strike coming in from the side, attempting to put herself bodily in between Yang and her father and shield her from a follow-up. With her balance thrown out of whack, her angle of approach is a partial botch. This, Taiyang had predicted, and he smoothly catches Blake’s fist to roll under her and send her toppling over to his right.

“Blake!” Yang shouts, a bit more worried than she should be with how the faunus manages to nimbly twist herself and roll into a crouch to mitigate the impact. Roughly, sure, and stinging with humility in having her move countered, but otherwise fine as can be. Her aura never even noticed.

“See, this is why we’re out here!” Tai says, rolling his neck and hopping back a short distance, readying himself. “Yang, you can’t just stick with your same old style before you get a hang of compensating – and your old style had problems to begin with! And Blake… you could have come in from my blind spot, just then. Didn’t have to try and block me off when I wasn’t going in for a chaser.”

The play-by-play might be a helpful learning experience later, but right now, Yang just wants to land a hit before her dad gets a big head and goes _Professor-ey_ on them. Figuring she can bump ‘learn to swing this hunk of steel’ down a space on the list, she reserves her prosthetic for clumsy blocking on the next approach. Instead, she comes in with her left side dominant, using the fist she can still rely on to lay a jab into Taiyang’s ribs.

She knows she could stick close and try a follow-up, but she still can’t be sure of her prosthetic for speed. Before her father can counterattack, she backs off, and occupies his attention and his guard to give Blake another shot. One the faunus takes, utilizing her agility to make up for her lack of prowess with her fists alone: zooming back and behind Tai and scoring a very light, but rapid two-hit combo. He rounds to guard her and soaks up the third in her chain, so she breaks off and entrusts Yang to pick up where she left off.

Now that Tai’s no longer got her in full focus, Yang finally dares to test out her clunkier, if fancier fist. Wagering she’s got a safe margin even for a slower swing, Yang pivots to wind up a solid punch with her prosthetic, and even though her dad catches it against a forearm, it sends the man skidding back and sparks the faintest little fizzle-spark of aura trailing from the site where it connects.

Tai grins broadly at the girls and chuckles. “Now that’s a bit better! Let’s _really_ get started.”

By the time the cabin’s back door lazily swings open with an enigmatic corgi dropping from the doorknob – _Zwei letting himself out to do his business_ – what began an hour ago as a simple little spar session with the initial goal of ‘make sure Yang can even use the arm to begin with’ has long since escalated. It’s still a far cry from the level they’d have back in the Academy training rooms, but for a first day back in action, it’s a great show of potential: the sort of fervor expected of a proper huntsman and huntresses.

The dog is used to the loud, shouty, fighty noise of the Big People doing their Big People Roughhousing in the yard, so he doesn’t rush to intervene unless he’s called. Settling onto his paws in a little loaf by the sidelines, Zwei watches on as Blake slams Tai with an open-palm strike and somersaults to safety, while Yang makes a sprinting leap up as far as she can, aiming to hit from on high while her father’s ready for low.

Tai counters hard, sending Yang spiraling airborne again in the opposite direction. As her eyes meet Blake’s, the faunus has an epiphany, and in that clarity she steadies her stance and holds an arm outstretched. Never wavering, never blinking, Yang picks up what they’re doing immediately. She throws out her right hand in turn.

Sleek chrome fingers clasp those of pale flesh, as the pair link up in an improvised, unarmed imitation of their paired team maneuver; even without _Gambol Shroud_ or _Ember_ Celica to perform it in its full glory, they know the gist by heart.

Digging a heel hard into the ground, Blake feeds Yang’s momentum into her own torque to fling her partner around and release her back towards Tai. The Father Dragon is too busy being stunned over the nigh-instantaneous communication of tactics to properly brace for the Sunny Little Dropkick coming his way, and while he gets his arms up to guard, Yang’s impact still sends him sprawling several feet back in a heap as they both hit the dirt.

What follows is a moment of silent surprise _(silent, with the exception of some aching middle-aged man noises)_ as all parties start to wind down after the successful last-second maneuver, Blake and Yang staring at each other with shaky smiles, and Tai _watching_ them stare.

“Phew! Alright, alright, we’d… hah.” Taiyang grunts and curls himself back into a crouch, then hops up to full height, kneading thumbs into his back. “A pretty good show for a first day back on the job, but we’d better cut it here, if you both still want me in one piece to make dinner. Speaking of which – you did _actually_ knock me on my back, so I might as well whip up something proper as a prize. You pick: Siu mei, or dumpling soup?”

Yang hoists herself up and wipes some of the smudged dirt from her pants. “Oh, you are NOT getting out of letting Blake try some of your char siu.”

“I’m fine with anything, honestly,” Blake adds for herself, politely, “but that does sound wonderful, thank you, Mister Xiao L-- Uh. Tai.”

“No need to be so formal with the guy you just roughed up, _Miss Belladonna_ ,” Tai teases, giving the girls a mock salute and heading back for the house, only stopping to pat-pat Zwei on the head in passing.

As he leaves, Yang shuffles over Blake’s way, idly checking her new arm for any scuffs. “Haven’t had Dad’s char siu in forever… Trust me, you’re in for a good one. A lot better than the TV dinners he buys in bulk.”

“They weren’t that bad,” Blake says, pretending to take an equal interest in Yang’s arm for an excuse to touch it, brushing away a smear of grime. “Microwaved mac-and-cheese will always beat out trail rations… By that extent, your dad’s cooking’s going to be great by default.”

“You’ve technically had it before, remember?” Yang asks, acutely aware of the fact Blake is fussing over cleaning her chrome, and hoping she can have it _continue._ The sensory feedback is minuscule compared to her real arm, but she swears she can feel her partner’s mix of silk-smooth skin and combat calluses nonetheless. “It was when Ruby and I got that care package before Vytal, the lunchboxes we split with you and Weiss? He did the potstickers.”

Huh. Blake does remember, vaguely. Though in all fairness it’s less about the sumptuous little potstickers themselves than the baked-in memory of the team sitting there on a bench in the Beacon commons, Yang by her side, digging into the meal together and joking, jabbing at one another with the chopsticks. “Right, right, yeah. Good times.”

Before either of them actually have to address why Blake is still rubbing Yang’s metallic forearm, or why Yang is holding said forearm out to _be_ touched, both huntresses drop their hands to their own sides, eagerly seeking out pockets to hide in, hems to straighten.

“Sooooo… He’ll probably shoo us off and won’t let us help with meal-prep; you wanna kill some time, go a few rounds in Amity Climax?” Yang offers, half-heartedly, knowing beyond doubt Blake would probably rather spend time doing anything else; she hasn’t forgotten how the faunus was only fractionally more interested in her-and-Ruby’s fighting games than Weiss. And Weiss was WEISS.

Blake snorts silently and rolls her eyes, but at the same time, the feline ear not presently packed in wrappings visibly perks up a little. “Sure. Sounds like fun.” _Of course it is. It’s time here, with Yang, doing… normal things, not worrying about murder and Grimm and redemption._

She sets out for the house, and eyes Zwei warily as she steps around the lazing dog to slide back into the cabin. Their temporary truce, while tenuous, is upheld. After all… even Zwei can tell how much more energy Yang has, how much more life, ever since the faunus showed up in their home. _He’s a very smart dog like that._

* * *

“Let me help with that–“ Blake blurts out, collecting the remaining half of the plates from the dinner table before Tai can get the chance.

The meal was as delicious as advertised, enhanced by that special factor of a meal after a nice workout earlier in the day. A little more awkward to be sitting around the table for Blake’s first proper dinner ever since becoming a freeloading vagrant here. Breakfast was one thing, when people were too groggy to be expected to say much, but up until this point her time with the Xiao Longs has typically had the three of them crashing in the living room of an evening as they noshed on simple reheated meals on paper plates. The TV always helped as a source of conversational white noise, when actual topics fell flat.

Blake had exactly two topics to comment on the entire time: Tai’s cooking, and the breakdown of their spar with plans for the future. Mostly, she kept to herself, nibbling away at the savory barbecued pork and stewing in her thoughts. Even though it was Tai’s offer to cook, there remained the latent sense of being greedy by accepting. _By being here. By being._

So when the meal wrapped up and Yang hustled off with first dibs on a shower, Blake tries to mitigate said guilt by at least helping tidy the table and offering to handle the dish washing.

Tai is having none of it. He drops his own plate in the sink and gives a bemused sort of laugh the faunus recognizes in yet another eerily-Yang-like mannerism. “Really, Blake, it’s no trouble. We haven’t had a guest in forever. Well, at least one who actually likes my cooking. Barty ‘n Pete have no appreciation for the finer points of domestic life, y’know?”

Blake waits for him to step aside and deposits her load of glasses and sticky, sauce-slathered plates, her upper ears trying to splay down flat to her scalp and only ending up half-successful.

“I just… It’s already so much that you’re letting me stay here, even when I’m barely doing anything, and I can’t pay, and you barely _know_ me…” She sighs, turning on the faucet and starting to commandeer the cleanup duty. It’s easier to keep her head down when she can pretend she’s just staring at the dishes. “I feel bad staying here and not helping out.”

“For one, _‘barely know you,’_ as if my daughters would ever shut up about you whenever we’d chat.” Weaponizing Blake’s own skittishness against her, Tai returns with his dorky lemon-yellow scrubby-gloves and glides right back in – the faunus repelled away from the sink like a magnet – subsequently taking over the washing once more. “And for two: Blake. _You are._ You are helping, and more than you know.”

“But I–“

“You weren’t here those first few months,” Tai barrels on, lifting up a soapy finger from the suds to point. “And _ah, ah,_ before you chase that path where you _think_ it leads, hear me out. You weren’t there, so no, you didn’t get to see what Yang was like, but you _also_ didn’t see me, either. How I was taking it.”

Not the direction Blake had expected, no, and she puts a pause on her retort while Tai continues down this fork in the road.

“I was a wreck. Even putting aside the whole, _‘oh, catastrophic terrorist attack the likes of which we’ve never seen in our lifetimes’_ thing, I just had both my daughters shipped back to me half-dead, at a point in their lives where the worst I should hear them grousing about is failing their finals in some Goodwitch class. Ruby took a bit to wake up, but once she did, it didn’t take long before she was pretty active again. Of course she was, right? She went and flew the coop. But Yang? Not so much. And I was _trying,_ Blake. Anything I could think of to cheer her up, to help her feel like her old self again even faster. Most of the time, I only made her more upset. Stuck my foot in my mouth.”

Blake stands listlessly, silently, having not a clue what to do with this information, _or_ do with herself as it’s being doled out. Leaning on the counter seems too casual, she can’t go sit back at the table, she _definitely_ can’t butt in with her _Entirely Reasonable And Not At All Irrational Case For Why She Doesn’t Deserve This,_ when Tai has command of the floor. So, she just… folds her arms, rubbing them anxiously, hovering nearby as her friend’s father speaks.

“You’re doing for Yang something I literally can’t do. You know how much I beat myself up over that all these months? That her own Dad wasn’t going to be enough? I already let her down once when she was grieving, back when her mom passed.”

Taiyang’s face tightens for a second, and the plate he’s cleaning slides back under the water. “But, that’s not the point here. She’s… acting _normal_ around you. Feeling normal. You haven’t even been here a full week, and she’s already making bigger strides. I was wondering how long she’d go without even trying out that arm, and the first day after you’re back? _Right on it goes._ Heck, I first find out about it because I catch the two of you pillow fighting! _Pillow fighting,_ when before if I heard loud noises like that from upstairs, I’d think she’d fallen, or was back to punching the walls again.”

The stabbing remorse Blake gets every time Yang’s suffering in those first months is, she feels, well deserved. It’s still so hard for her to put together, the idea that she could be _anything but_ a burden on this family, on the people she cares about. That she isn’t just an imposition, even when being told straight to her face that she makes a difference.

She tries to speak up, but the “I just…” she uses to start is frail, and falters back into silence immediately. “I didn’t really even...”

Taiyang doesn’t give her an inch of clearance to start attacking herself. Even if there are some barbs and rough patches on the topics of discussion, they still need to be spoken, and still need to be drilled into the antsy faunus to make it stick that she will always be welcome. He drops a squeaky-clean dinner plate into the drying rack and starts wiping down a glass, casual as can be despite the severity of events he’s dredging up.

“And then… You brought down the man who hurt her. Who hurt both of you, from what I’ve been told, even beyond that one night. I can’t pretend I’ve got the stomach to be a-okay with killing, but I can tell you don’t either. And I also can’t pretend that I didn’t sit there across from Yang in the hospital, head in my hands, _wishing I could get that man myself._ If I wasn’t halfway retired and didn’t have my girls to look after, I might’ve even suited up and tried, anything to know he wasn’t still out there, looking for her. Anything if it would help with her nightmares to know he was gone. But you took care of it for me.”

He lets a few beats pass before he gives her a sincere, respectful look. Once he can catch her eyes, at least. “So... I know it would be crass for me to thank you for putting an end to him, when we both feel how we do about the method… But I can still thank you for protecting my daughter all the same.”

“S-she…” Blake cringes, trying for the life of her to find _some_ way to deflect the undeserved thanks, even just minimize it somehow. Make it seem like her quest was normal. “Yang _lost her arm_ trying to protect me… so, _of course_ I had to try and protect her, too. Isn’t that what partners are supposed to do? We protect each other.”

The squeezing hold she has on herself is bone-breaking by now, and Tai’s exercising a good deal of self-control not to push boundaries by yanking the poor girl into a big fatherly hug then and there.

“It’s just… After what Adam said to me that night – He swore to me he was going to destroy _everything I loved. Starting with **her.**_ ” Blake takes a sharp breath, and her sigh is ragged, her eyes dewy. “That’s when she walked in, that’s when it happened.”

Tai gives an odd, interested little hum at that. Not… quite the reaction Blake had expected – _did she say something strange, was it her wording? She was just quoting him._ Either way, she moves on.

“At first I didn’t know _how_ to protect her, if… if I should just run, get away from her as far as I could, so he’d never hurt her for being near me, or if it wouldn’t work and he’d… What? What is it?”

“Mhm. I thought as much.”

_Huh?_ Blake’s head tilts a bit, and she quirks a brow in confusion. The man’s been giving her an oddly amused sort of look for a while now, and she can’t really guess as to why. They’re not talking about anything funny, and she can’t recall anything for him to have ‘ _thought-as-much’_ about!

Backtracking, Blake runs through the conversation. All she did was start to relay why she went down the path she did, because of how Adam threatened to kill the things she _lov–_

Blake’s bleak mood and contrite countenance are shattered in an instant, paving way for a bright blush crawling its way from her shoulders upward, her good feline ear flitting high and alert.

“I-it’s not like that!” she insists, wide-eyed and waggling her hands in front of herself. _She lets one thing be taken the wrong way and all that piled-up thanks was for nothing, he’s going to kick her out for sure! And maybe it wasn’t completely wrong, but still, she should’ve been more careful…!_

Mr. Xiao Long’s big boisterous dad-laugh is back in play, and he doesn’t feel too bad about enjoying Blake’s reaction. “It’s not, huh? Maybe I missed something, I was just going off what I thought I heard. _Oooor_ just the way you two’ve been looking at each other since the day you showed up? The fact I made up Ruby’s bed for you, and it hasn’t been slept in once? Or that little pillow nest you’ve got going on at the foot of Yang’s?”

“Seriously, it’s not – We aren’t actually.. Yang and I haven’t… and I was just – I wanted to keep watch in case she had a nightmare, like she used to do for me back at Beacon, and...!”

_Gods, this girl’s going to give herself a heart attack. Heh. **Heart** attack._ Tai pats himself on the back for that internal pun, then waves off Blake’s desperate rant. “Relax, kiddo. I’m just messin’ with ya.”

It’s a good thing the messing-with has come to an anticlimactic conclusion, because the sound of rushing water from the bathroom has cut out, replaced with a noisy blowdryer fan upstairs.

“Ope, sounds like she’s done in there, guess you’re up. I’ll be lucky to have any hot water left, all you long-hairs outnumbering me now, heh.” Tai shakes his head, then points Blake along with a shake of a soapy baking sheet. “Go on, get outta here. You’ve already endured enough Dad Talk for one day.”

Blake cobbles together a series of shy, stuttery nonsense noises and head-bows as she makes her escape, leaving the snickering father to his clean-up. One would think he’s had his fun bullying the girls for one night, but he can’t resist one more opportunity that arises once Blake’s situated in the shower and Yang wanders down for a glass of water to take her evening painkillers.

Yang has only just finished filling it up from the tap when she turns to see her father, infernally smug smile plastered on his face, drying his hands over by the pantry.

“...I _thought_ you said she **_wasn’t_** your girlfriend.”

_Yang burns pink._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hope that was okay enough. kinda just... floundering around here.  
> final flashback next time.  
> tfw I shouldn't have ever tried to become a fic writer but I've got two simultaneous ongoings and I've gotta finish them before I can give up foreverrrrrrrr  
> I want 2020 to be over and for 2021 to also not happen. At least one of those two will have occurred by the time the next chapter's up.  
> bleep bloop...


	6. Atonement

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After four agonizing months waging a one-woman war against Adam's extremist camp, Blake makes her final move.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and here it is, the edgy, likely-kinda-cringe conclusion to the flashbacks  
> stuck with writers block on the next bit so like... posting... this here might like... I dunno... motivate me to hurry up and actually write?
> 
> (Chapter CWs for: Semi-graphic-ish violence, a total lack of self-preservation bordering on suicidal ideation, and... just Adam in general.)  
> [Obligatory Chapter Listening](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3o9IuG8Ych8)

Six Nights Ago – A Camp in Flames

_In the heart of the Forever Fall, the White Fang encampment is under siege._

Another tree collapses, weakened by the encroaching wreath of fire, this time toppling onto what was once a materiel storage depot. A crate of ice dust slugs detonates, sending a flurry of frosty shrapnel tearing through the crumpling tent’s tarp walls.

Adam Taurus spins to deflect the spray, icicles shattering into a cloud of harmless shavings as they meet his blade, and their kinetic energy soaked into raw charge for his semblance.

He stomps onward down the path that was once the main thoroughfare, now an empty stretch of ruin, left almost entirely unguarded as panicked figures flee for the hills through whatever gaps the wildfire has yet to seal. Abandoning the camp and the cause, rats fleeing the sinking ship.

His glare falls upon a nearby Fang soldier crouching behind an overturned folding table for cover, fumbling to reload his pistol. His shaky fingers clumsily slam his magazine against the butt of the gun again and again, until his head snaps up at his leader’s presence.

"T-the enemy! They've got us surrounded!" he shouts, daring to peek over the top of his cover, until another crackling explosion sounds off in the distance. Then another two detonations, identical and simultaneous, from the opposite side. One more from the front at an evenly-measured interval.

Almost as if they were timed. Almost as if they were intended to produce the effect of a larger, armed force encroaching from all sides. A tactic Adam once taught to his disciple.

He kicks the table flat, and the grunt yelps, hopping to his feet and finally slamming his reload home, scanning the smoky haze on the horizon. "Idiot!” the Bull spits at the frightened rookie, and abandons him to stalk down the path. “There is no 'they!' _It's her!_ "

If it’s the _her_ that Adam’s been warning the watchmen about in fits of unhinged ranting these last weeks, then the poor grunt has all the more reason to turn tail and bail while the leader’s back is turned. He isn’t missed.

Small craters pockmark the dirt road from the leader’s tent to the camp commons, increasing in density the further he goes. Most are shallow and scattershot, simple surface impacts expected in a clash between trained warriors, but others much deeper, bombs buried and left in wait well before tonight.

The center of camp is brightly lit, both by the light of the moon above and the inferno all around its edges. The mess hall, the command tent, the small stage he uses for his morning orders and combat training demonstrations, all steadily gnawed away by the hungry flames.

A sputter of low-caliber rounds pepper the dirt in front of him in a straight row; he stops short and grips _Wilt_ close. In that moment, a dark figure eclipses the shattered moon as it leaps from the communications antenna, front-flipping into a rigid three-point landing on the opposing side of the bullet-dotted line in the sand.

Blake Belladonna is a vision of rugged, desperate fury. As she stands tall, she tears off her stolen, mud-caked White Fang winter duster and flings it to the wind. Beneath lies the dirty remains of the same casual clothing she’d once worn at Beacon, now ripped and rumpled from months of rough living, held in place with a surfeit of straps and bandoliers loaded for bear. Bound up and out of the way, her hair is held in a high ponytail, whipping in the wind.

Her face, painted with a smudgy blend of red berries and clay, bears a pattern she’d worn so many years ago, when they were just idealistic youths playacting at being proper freedom fighters. Before Auntie Sienna tried to instill the true virtues of the cause, and only one of them had listened. Before she’d earned her mask. Crimson shadows her glaring eyes with sharp points, and etches the sides of her face in three rows of contoured whisker-scratches. It deepens the color of her lips, and trails down the middle of her chin.

As soon as they recognize the figure standing in their midst is not one of their own, the various loyalist stragglers start to congregate around the edges of the area, looking to one another, to Adam, to the intruder, looking for any sort of go-ahead to either get busy or get gone. At the fore, a leopard-tailed lieutenant with a revving chainsword calls out for guidance.

“Sir! Do we–?”

Blake doesn’t pay the peanut gallery much heed, nor does she expect she’ll need to account for them in what is to come. _Because it’s Adam. Because he's going to say something like..._

" **No!** She's **_mine_** to punish!"

_‘Called it,’ Blake thinks unenthusiastically, in a tone not unlike her partner’s._

Liberated of their obligation to die for their leader, the onlookers peel off in all directions, still jumping at shadows and firing at phantom foes in the trees. None remain but the Bull and the Wildcat.

When Blake finally speaks, her voice is strained, rattled with emotion and choked by the smoke. "I'm already punishing myself,” she says coldly, bringing _Gambol Shroud_ around at the ready. Shaken by the enormity of the moment and the frenzy of battle, she slips in and out of the script she’s long since prepared for herself these past months. “ _This hunt_ is my atonement. _”_

“Tch. Don’t try to act so selfless when I know how selfish you can be, Blake… Don’t try to justify your betrayal and brutality as a _‘hunt.’_ Don’t act as if you were ever meant to be a huntress.”

Adam begins to lower himself into a half-crouch, left leg inching back, hand on his hilt in Iaidō stance. “We both know it’s because of your pride; _all this_ because I bested your _human whore._ Tell me, darling, have I really left you so wanting as a lover? I even forgave you your cheating, I had the compassion to leave her alive. Or have you grown bored with her, now that she’s broken?”

 _No. No, gods, no._ Blake closes her ears to her former mentor’s goading and follows her flimsy script through to completion. _“For her!”_ she screams, “For everyone you’ve hurt! ...And for me! _The me that I was before!”_

Adam heaves a theatrical sigh, shaking his head. “And you can’t even give me an answer. Unreasonable as always. At least I tried to speak with you like an equal, but it seems you’re set on being an undisciplined child. I won’t spare the rod this time, my love.”

Another timed charge blasts the remainder of the wooden stage with a crack like a starter pistol, sending a charred and splintered plank spinning a mere inch before Adam’s face as he dodges back. When it’s gone, Blake is there.

Sparks fly as _Gambol Shroud_ meets _Wilt_ for the first time in months, since that night in the ruined dining hall. So much is similar – the flames and wreckage all around, the raw animosity – but so much is different as well: Blake’s first strike hits harder, heavier, while Adam’s famine-weakened form draws more heavily on his aura to absorb the force _._ Blake’s blade is primed and razor-sharpened, while Adam’s feels duller than it should, less deadly in its cut.

The force of the clash sends both fighters sliding back from the center of the clearing, and Adam grits his teeth as something sharp pierces his boot and jabs into his heel.

 _Caltrops?!_ Jagged, roughly-conjoined spikes of scrap iron she’d scattered behind his back when his attention was elsewhere. _That explains what became of the missing hand-welder._ Kicking the damned thing out wastes precious time, in which Blake swoops in to clip his side, and disappears.

“Gch-ah…! Your parents, Khan, always preaching about our _honor,_ the _dignity_ of our people… What good was it all, when you’re _still running even now!?”_

Adam hops behind the pool of traps to put some distance between himself and his former p _rotégée, e_ nough to recenter himself. He draws up _Blush_ to flush Blake out of hiding, the gun-scabbard’s barrage punching ugly holes into a trio of metal drums. The feline kicks one back his direction as she tumbles away, the pair trading potshots with their weapons’ respective ranged configurations until their spiraling pattern around the arena meets in the middle in another melee clash.

“Do you finally regret your choices? Are you afraid?” he growls at her, in the thin margins between the loud **_clang_** of countless rapid sword-strikes.

Again and again, Blake goes – _predictably_ – for his right side, his right arm, seemingly dead-set on enacting some kind of petty poetic justice disabling him as such. She might not even be conscious of the choice herself, but Adam realizes what she’s doing straightaway. The attacks become mere child’s play to block, and every slash hammered against his guard only feeds his semblance further.

 _“Are you?”_ Blake replies.

He doesn’t notice the hairline fractures beginning to take shape at the point of impact. Blake does, but despite her repartee, she’s not filled with full confidence – she knows now she should have taken the risk, gone in for more dramatic, if potentially overt, sabotage of his sword before throwing down the gauntlet tonight.

It’s too late now; she’s made it a race against time. For every forceful blow that fails to completely destroy _Wilt,_ fate begins to favor Adam’s odds for a turnabout victory.

What trepidation Adam had about the situation begins to wane, feeding on Blake’s uncertainty to quench his own fears, and their next few clashes grow wild as he presses a perceived advantage.

Adam throws a feint, then swings for Blake’s neck with deadly precision. She just barely ducks in time for it to slash her upper-right ear instead, drawing an awful shriek of pain. Only by the grace of her aura’s protection is the thing still attached at all. Adam grins down at her in sick satisfaction.

Clutching the bleeding appendage, Blake yanks one of the tools from her bandolier and hurls it down, the improvised explosive shrouding the area in a thick cloud of white smoke, blending into dim grays where it mingles with the sooty black of the burning debris.

Coughing himself hoarse, Adam sweeps his sword in wild arcs in every direction, not as much aiming to land a hit as to ward one away. He can hear Blake hacking as well, hear her grunts of exertion, the clink of gadgetry transforming, but even with faunus hearing heightened a degree beyond a human’s, his is nothing compared to the tracking of a feline predator.

That said, one of those all-hearing ears is out of commission, partly deafening and disorienting its owner. When Blake swings herself around a tree-trunk on _Gambol’s_ ribbon to blindside the Bull with a flying kick, it ends up a lopsided body-slam instead. The purpose is still achieved; Adam is knocked backwards, further into the haze, and the long-suffering tree comes crashing down between them in a temporary blockade.

With Adam distracted, Blake frantically grasps at her toolbelt yet again, pulling free a thin medical auto-injector: a chemical cocktail of emergency aura-stabilizers, adrenaline, and _Brothers-know-what-else_ all rolled into one convenient combat stimulant.

Without a single shit given for proper safety procedures, she slams it hard into her exposed navel, _X-marks-the-spot_ atop her cross-shaped scar, mashing the plunger. The world swims in a chromatic smear, Blake’s sharpened faunus eyes rapidly wavering between thin slits and pupils blown wide as the world tightens into focus.

She rips the needle free and tosses the empty injector to distract her foe, followed with another spatter of gunfire as he clambers between the broken branches.

Blake clamps down on the trigger ‘til she gets nothing but clicks, and swears under her breath. Only a third of the rounds even seem to make it through his constant defense, the rest pinging off as they’re deflected off the cracked sword. She cringes at the sight; for all her efforts to break through quickly enough to avoid the risk, she’s seen that look in him before, the menace, felt the bloodthirst infusing his aura and sloughing off him. He’s ready.

Yet she’s so, so close. She may not have disarmed him as early on as she’d hoped, but there’s still one final recourse. When she goes to reload Gambol, she doesn’t reach for her regular rounds or dust supply. What she slots in is a bastardized substitute, three hand-loaded cartridges of custom dust blends shoddily soldered together into a contiguous triple-length hodge-podge that barely fits inside the loading mechanism and juts out from the end. She’s slotting in a very bad idea.

_And maybe it was a bad idea to come here tonight, and maybe it was a bad idea to come here at all, and maybe, just maybe, it was a bad idea not to run._

But it’s much too late for that now. His hair, his emblem, all his markings burn a raging scarlet as his semblance expends its charge, and he brings his sword down overhead in a decisive overhead slash.

Blake holds _Gambol Shroud_ high, well-aware her weapon will crumple like paper beneath Adam’s Moonslice, even in its frail state. But she doesn’t need to fend him off this time. She only needs to wait until he’s close enough, until the very last instant as it threatens to shred _Gambol_ apart, before she plays her final gambit.

Mixing disparate forms of dust for in-weapon application, as an amateur, is one of the first things freshmen are taught _never_ to do in any Dust Science 101 class worth its salt. Refining multi-dust blends is a very complex science, as are the internal mechanisms within a huntress’ weapon that allow for channeling it. One should never utilize dust blends within their weapon unless produced by a professional with a fully-featured laboratory.

Similarly, Weapons Workshop would relay that a dust-bearing weapon should never be loaded past its intended capacity, and attempting to force rapid-fire type switches or multi-channeling outside of specialized equipment is just asking for critical component damage, if not an outright backfire.

_‘Suicidal,’ they’d called it._

As Adam’s blade bears down upon her, Blake tugs the secondary trigger, and feels the feeding mechanism _st-st-stutter_ as it forces through the oversized homemade cartridge chain all at once, her semblance flaring to life, aura sapped to the brink as it’s drawn upon and pushed past its limits.

_[One eighth Gravity Dust. Six eighths Ice. One part depleted crystal for filler.]_

The first clone coalesces around a gravity well, Adam’s relentless slash cut short as his arm is jerked forward, _Wilt_ sucked to the center and sealed within the hyper-dense Blake-shaped glacier that materializes over it.

_[One half Combustion Dust. Half Earth.]_

Growing seamlessly, grotesquely from the back of the first clone as Blake glides backwards, the second: a trembling earthen sculpture with a white-hot molten core, cracking to pieces and ready to erupt at the slightest touch.

_[Full-cartridge Wind.]_

A shimmering distortion in the air completes the six-armed shadow-clone chimera, only present for a heartbeat before the burst blows Blake straight to the other side of the clearing.

She doesn’t even get to see the fruits of her plan played out – She’s slammed against the ruin of a prefab structure and knocked dizzy with the concussive force, her aura instantly disintegrating in a flash-flicker-flash of violet.

All she makes out is the bright lights and the roar as the volcanic doppelganger ruptures in an explosive fury, its force finally, utterly **shattering** the priceless sword inside, with the whirlwind’s backblast funneling every last bit of shrapnel – ice, molten rock, and bright red steel – right into a paralyzed Adam Taurus.

Blake might just be glad she can’t see it clearly.

She shuts her eyes for a second. Tries to shut her ears, too. Just a second. Maybe a minute, actually. She just needs to breathe, that’s all. Just a minute to breathe.

When the howling from the other end of the arena quiets to raspy panting, she knows it’s time to get up. She hasn’t seen her mission through.

She’s saddened, but unsurprised, to see _Gambol Shroud_ in two. On either side of her, up against the collapsed wall, a half of her sword lies steaming in the dirt, and her battered sheath wedged a good few inches into a nearby stump.

Blake crawls for the top half of the fractured blade first, then the hilt once the sparking and sizzling from the fried internal mechanisms has died down. All gathered up, she considers the remains of her weapon, gazing down forlornly and whispering a quiet apology.

The personal weapon of a huntress: An extension, a part, a representation of the self, as they always say. And now look what she’s done with it. _Maybe it can be mended someday,_ she thinks. _Just not tonight._

 _Wilt & Blush,_ by comparison, are beyond reconciliation. What shards of Adam’s weapon don’t litter the ground in a broad arc all around him are still buried in his body, fragments all along his upper torso mixed with sharp spikes of cooling rock. Large patches of his jacket have been shredded or burnt into tatters, and his fractured mask knocked a few yards away.

_What does it say about her now, that her own blood rejoices at the sight of his?_

As Blake clambers to her feet and stumbles his direction with dire purpose, he makes a token effort to rearm himself. This presents a problem when his sword arm is… _absent,_ its remainder already cauterized by the solidifying lava, and the sword itself little more than a hilt.

She kicks it away nonetheless, and crumples to straddle his broken body. Her golden eyes, growing wet with guilt and grief and flashing danger in the firelight, meet his single blue only once before she can’t stand to look any longer.

Instead, she lethargically lifts _Gambol’s_ lower half and begins to align it with his chest.

Adam’s voice is hate-soaked, indignant, but exhausted. Gone are the pretense and the sophistry.

 _“What,”_ he coughs, _“what do you even SEE IN HER?”_

She can’t help it; she looks again. She meets his eye, and she remembers.

She remembers being twelve, and being drawn to a certain sort of charisma and passion. To a bold fighter who seemed to wear their heart on their sleeve. She remembers adolescent curiosity leading her to jump to conclusions about herself. About what she wanted, and what she was willing to endure to get it. She remembers when a gentle hand between her feline ears turned to an iron grip in her hair. When partnership became duty became obligation. When _belonging with_ became _belonging to._

And then she remembers a frock of golden locks, a sunshine smile, a great big heart that burned with life. An outstretched hand, an outstanding offer to listen, to help, to hold through nightmares and nostalgia. She remembers being taught to feel safe again, bit by bit, remembers feeling she _belonged with,_ not only _to,_ that she was wanted, that maybe she would never be _too much._ That she was something worth risking a life for.

 _Gambol Shroud_ slots neatly between Adam’s ribs.

“A future,” she replies. _And then it is done._

There’s no time to cry. There’s no time to cry, the fire encroaches, the fear and anguish are thick on the wind and the Grimm will be here any moment, _there’s no time._ But she cries. She pulls her weapon free, and looks down at what she’s done, and knows it was right, and she _cries_ for the first time in months.

It’s done. She’s done. He can’t hurt her anymore. He can’t hurt the her-that-was, or what little is left of the her-that-is. He can’t hurt Yang, and the her-that-she-should-have-been. _Was it worth it? Please. Please, let it have all been worth it._

**_SCRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAWWWWW–!_ **

A Nevermore’s cry precedes its wingbeats buffeting the charred treetops as it soars over the camp. The braying of beasts in the distance makes itself known over the din.

Blake turns her attention from the epitome of her past and slumps off. She tears the White Fang flag that once flew high above the command tent down from its pole. Bits and pieces of a broken blade, a bloodstained mask, she gathers them up and ties them up inside, secured tight with a wrap around her shoulder. She finds what became of her ratty winter duster and pulls the soot-streaked thing on over herself.

Another hurried dose from the medical injectors – she’s only got two, maybe three stims left, if that will last her until she hits the coast, and won’t fry her sympathetic nervous system in the process. The path there, the path west, is already accruing a gang of curious Grimm sniffing out the presence of any unfortunate survivors.

Her ribbon is wrapped tight around the broken top end of her blade to provide a safe dagger-grip for dual-wielding. Even gone all to pieces, a huntress and her weapon, deadly as ever when held to a purpose.

When the first of the Beowolves lumbers her way and readies a swipe, she spins beneath and sinks her makeshift dagger into the thinner hide of its jugular, banishing it in a cloud of black. Even battered, bleeding, and aura-broken, it had no hope of stopping her. None of them do.

It’s time to go _home._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry about all that.  
> kinda had more planned too, but, uh. I can't. write fight scenes. I mean, I can't write at ALL really, but-- bwah, you know what I mean!  
> uuuugh. I really want to write stuff but I don't wanna write stuff that suuuucks or doesn't vibe with peopleeee, and...  
> I wanna finish this Bee story RIGHT and GOOD with a few more chapters to get them snuggled up and on their way, AND I wanna write more of my Happy Huntress stuff even though I know nobody cares about it and/or generally dislikes it aaaand I gotta finish my Edeleth fic tooo, and that's even before I risk touching other fandoms I might have a couple ideas for, and-- and I'm STILL not a writer, and...  
> ヾ(。￣□￣)ﾂ weh. im. kind of crashing out.


	7. In Memoriam

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A rough night of recollections sees Blake and Yang awake far too early for their own good. Yang thinks it's time for the two to pay a visit to a very special place.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> mleh. hello. hi. bleep bloop. im... sorta still here, i guess. simultaneously try'na write as fast as I can and not grunk it up too much by rushing. and. kinda writing this to stall on writing my other fic I'm even MORE stuck on. oops. sorry. hope this is. like. okay. i would like if it was okay.
> 
> ...Let's have the Bees share some EMOTIONS, shall we?

Neither huntress rests well that night. Both of them sat helplessly through a mental theater production they couldn’t walk out of, a rerun of the story Blake recounted to Yang the evening after their spar, before they’d dozed off. Both awaken long before they’d rather, and stew silently in their emotion before ever realizing the other is doing the same.

Yang is unsettled, to say the least. She almost lost Blake, and she never even knew it. Yeah, she’d already ‘lost’ her, in theory, in how she’d disappeared off the grid... but that’s different, that’s not _lost_ lost.

That terrifies her still. She has Blake here, at the foot of her bed, and she’s still retroactively fearful for her partner’s life. Not only afraid Adam could have killed her – Afraid of how _ready_ she was to die. Almost _expecting to._

Maybe even _wanting_ to, and that’s the most chilling of all.

 _But she’s still here. She’s here,_ Yang reminds herself, _she’s here and within reach._ She could reach out and touch her if she wanted. _Well. Maybe not only if she wanted._ Because she wants. She wants, and won’t. Because she _can’t._

Yet.

So she sits there, eyes unfocused with drowsiness, taking in the blurred shape of a Blake, just across the bed from her. She’s technically a little further out than arm’s reach, but right there. Sharing the room. Sharing the bed.

Taiyang had once again peeked in to check on the pair during a late night bathroom run, and secretly, he wondered if he’d only gone and unwittingly sabotaged things by pointing out he was aware they shared – Blake’s back to scrunching right on the edge, afraid to occupy more space than she thinks she’s allowed.

Yang doesn’t think she’s going to be getting back to sleep, no matter how badly this bodes for her already tenuous sleep schedule, and as she listens to the faint breathing from the bed’s other occupant, she gets a hunch.

“Hey. Are you awake?” Yang asks softly, unsure.

She scores a hit, lucky her. “Mhm.” One of Blake’s eyes peers open, a thin crescent of gold under thick lashes. “No luck with sleep?”

“Not much. You?”

“...Only a little.”

Well. At least they’re on the same page.

The laser-light feature on top of Yang’s alarm clock projects a readout of the time onto the ceiling in bold font: **5:22 AM.** Even set on low, it’s the brightest thing in the room, the remainder around them painted in shades of dark blues and purples, dim and slow and sleepy, just like them.

“I had a nightmare about it, the, uh. That… stuff we talked about. What happened before you got here to Patch,” Yang admits, almost finding it easier to be open in these early hours, like the world being as whisper-quiet as her words means she won’t disturb a thing.

Blake shuts her eye again, and her ears curl down. “...Same here.” Sharing a dream with her partner would be… well, something out of a _dream,_ were it a more positive context, more fuel for her soulmate fantasies… but not like this.

For a time, silence, only interrupted here and there by the distant morning songs of birds returning for the spring.

“I’ve thought about it the last couple days… I think I know what I want to do with those things you brought with you. His…” Yang gestures towards her face, then pantomimes a sword-swing.

Blake’s still only half-aware, but she’s got a gut feeling Yang’s got her heart set on something. “I’m… that’s… good? What did you have in mind?” If her partner’s got a plan, she’s got a plan.

“There’s somewhere I need to go. I probably should have a long time ago, but I just wasn’t…” Yang shrugs. “I should do it now, before I lose the nerve.” She meets Blake’s eyes with purpose and raises a brow in an unspoken question. Doesn’t have to be.

Blake doesn’t even ask where. She lets the blanket fall from around her shoulders.

“Yeah. Let’s go.”

The pair split to change separately – a habit they’ve conveniently developed since their reunion, despite a year of the team managing sufficient modesty all changing together in their Beacon dorm – then reconvene for Blake to help Yang with her morning meds and reapplying her right arm. It’s not as if either _needs_ makeup, and Yang made it clear they wouldn’t be headed anywhere densely populated or have anyone else to impress, but both huntresses hang around the small vanity to do a bit of barebones touch-up regardless.

A text is left for Taiyang telling of their brief trip, and failing that, a sticky-note slapped to the door of Yang’s room in case he forgets to check his scroll first. A bottle of water to share, a couple of high-protein breakfast bars, and they’re out the door into the low light and nippy air of a waking Patch, readying for the new day.

* * *

"So other than being _proof,_ what… _exactly_ did you expect me to DO with them at the time?" Yang asks, swinging the bundled-up White Fang flag and its morbid contents as she walks.

Blake stares down at her shoes. “I don't know, it was supposed to be a symbolic gesture, so… so maybe you’d do something symbolic _with_ them?” It all made a lot more sense in her head at the time, and she’d spent months ruminating on it, growing grander with every reimagining. “Maybe… melt them down, forge them into your weapon or something, just like–“

Yang laughs out loud; she can’t believe she knows what’s coming next, and all thanks to her curious literary pursuits during their separation. “Just like Kuromi did… in _Ninjas of Love.”_

The faunus’ feline ears splay themselves at their lowest, and she mumbles dumbly, “Yeah.”

“You’re a dork.”

“Only in your eyes, _Himawari-sama.”_

If a year ago, one were to tell Blake she’d be casually joking with the object of her hopeless crush about the plot points of her lurid love-ninja novels, she would have called it delusional.

Then again, the Blake of a year prior wouldn’t believe in a _lot_ of things that have happened.

It’s been little over half an hour’s walk that Yang’s led them on, mostly over dirt roads with the occasional whimsical detour onto gravel, and into the forests. It’s strange for Blake to see the trees like this, now that the persistent moody lighting is starting to warm with the sunrise approaching; even with her night-vision, the forests of Patch had seemed so hostile and foreboding as she crawled through them that freezing first night. Now, she can see the buds and blossoms, the bird nests, little nooks where squirrels have made their home. 

It must have been nice to grow up here. Aside from… the less-pleasant parts of Yang’s past.

On that note, Yang also hasn’t spoken as to where _exactly_ they’re going, or why. It has to be somewhere meaningful, doesn’t it? And somewhere she knows quite well, if she’s navigating them there without a map.

They make smalltalk about anything that strikes their fancy, the weather, the local wildlife, the local Grimm populations – _“Ruby always used to come out here alone, practice on the Beowolves, even when Dad would chew her out for it later.”_ – Just simple things, but Blake can sense Yang’s uncertainty, like she wants to delay hitting their destination just as much as she’s raring to get there.

The forest thickets start to thin, and soon Blake can make out a cliffside on the horizon through their trunks and branches. Yang’s grown entirely too contemplative these last few minutes, the same way she gets when she’s taken with nostalgia, so the faunus doesn’t pry. She’ll figure it out on her own.

The pair exit the woods onto a thin strip of grassy plain, a silent, secluded cliff bracketed by the treeline behind them and curving a bit to either side. It rises in a shallow slope before dropping off into the sea, Blake’s ears picking up the brushing of waves against the rocky shoreline.

She can’t see anything else of note, except at the very end, the very center. A rectangular gray stone marker, emblazoned with an all-too-familiar emblem, and a bit of text her sharp faunus eyes can _just_ make out if she squints:

**_Summer Rose_ **

**_Thus Kindly I Scatter_ **

_Oh._

“Sorry I didn’t tell you, I know this is kind of heavy,” Yang says, too apologetic for her own good. “We don’t have to stick around here very long, just give me a minute? It’s been a while since I talked to her.”

“What? No, no, it’s fine! Do what you need to, I’ll be here with you. If. If that’s alright.”

“...More than alright.”

Rather than standing coldly off to the edge of the field by the treeline and waiting, Blake takes a chance and follows her partner right up to the gravestone, albeit sticking a few paces back to avoid crowding her as Yang drops into a crouch, holding the bag of trophies close.

“Hey, Mom. Uh. Sorry I… haven’t come around. Things have been… things’ve been really messed up for a while, actually.” Yang pauses, then looks over her shoulder at Blake, sharing a weak smile. “But they’re getting better.”

_Blake’s chest clamps down on her heart._

“I know Dad ‘n Ruby probably already came down here a bunch more than me, probably told you everything that happened in Vale, so… I don’t need to bore you with all that. You already know Ruby’s taken off for Mistral… Was pretty quiet back home, ‘til this last week.

I got a new arm a few days ago. I mean, not a new _real_ arm, but… a replacement. Prosthetic, y’know, like I’m some kind of cool cyborg from the movies Dad didn’t want you taking me to? It doesn’t have a big laser gun or a missile launcher, but, heh, it’s still decent now that I stopped being a scaredy-cat and put it on.

And speaking of cats... best of all… my partner came back.”

_Oh, Yang._

“The one I told you about? Blake? Moody, beautiful bookworm ninja faunus?”

Yang is very, VERY aware who’s hovering over her shoulder, but she just can’t stop herself. _Mom deserves to know everything about this wonderful girl she met._

“Yeah, I… I was scared for a while there. I thought she was gone for good, which – I mean, I totally feel stupid about it NOW, there’s no way that would happen, right? She’d never stay gone forever. But I let it get to me for a long time. And now she’s back, and I’m– Stuff’s just… It’s like I’m _alive_ again.”

_Oh, **gods,** Yang._

Yang lifts up the bundle of sword-shards, the bundle holding Adam’s mask, just so the grave can see. “She even went out and got the guy that did this. To me, and Beacon, and everybody. He… hurt her, too. Not, uh, not in the same way or anything, she’s still got all her arms and legs attached, but… Just, he was a monster, to both of us. The kind we thought we’d never really be safe from. _And now... we don’t have to be afraid of him anymore.”_

In night terrors, in bad flashes of memory, maybe. But in the light of day, in the waking hours, he’ll never haunt them again.

Yang stands and steps up close to the stone marker, staring hard at the horizon. She takes a steady breath in through her nose, out through her lips, and heaves the bundle high off the cliff’s edge. The torn flag unfurls midflight, and the dozen crimson shards of _Wilt_ catch a gleam in the morning sun, sparkling as they arc up, away, and down into the sea. Adam’s mask twirls once, lit bone-white in the light, then sinks like a stone. Down into the ocean’s depths, never to be seen again.

Yang chokes out some ugly, pained noise. A stale breath she’s been holding back since Beacon, blotting up her lungs. And then it’s gone. She can fill her them with fresh, salty seaside air, and her next dry sob is a happy one.

“Mom, I think you’d love her. I mean, I really...”

She can’t say it. She’s been running on raw momentum for a minute now, but she’s still got the self-awareness not to blow herself up on the spot. _This is messed up. She probably doesn’t feel like I… and at a time like this, and… what, saying stuff like that while I’m talking to my dead Mom?_

Interrupting the internal monologue, something taps on Yang’s shoulder. When she turns her head, she finds Blake chewing her lip, glossy eyes flicking between hers and the grave.

“Could… I talk to her? Would that be okay?”

Unable to trust her voice not to crack, Yang nods rapidly and slides aside, giving Blake room to drop down in her place. The faunus sits frozen there, twisting her hands in her lap until the words start to flow.

“Um, h-hello, Missus Rose. _Summer._ Tai would probably tell me you’d tell me to say Summer, just like how he keeps telling me to say ‘Tai,’ so– Anyway. I’m Blake Belladonna. But, I guess Yang already told you who I was…”

Yang giggles despite herself, and Blake shoots an exaggeratedly acidic glance back at her.

“S-shut up…! Your oldest daughter’s a _bully,_ Summer,” Blake continues in a playful huff, once Yang’s raised her hands in surrender. “But… she’s also amazing. Amazingly strong, amazingly kind, amazingly smart, even if she lets people believe she’s a dumb blonde on purpose… She deserves the world. Definitely deserves a lot better than me for a partner.”

Now it’s Yang’s chest that’s tightening, because she’s seen this before, and were they anywhere else, _doing_ anything else, she’d shoulder-charge right in and stop Blake from sinking into that same whirlpool of guilt. But there’s something different, now that there’s a third party in the conversation, that keeps her from intruding. She holds her tongue. For now.

“I’m sure your daughters’ve already said a bunch of nice things about me, but left out all of the bad. And there’s a lot of it. I won’t bore you with my whole life story, but… out of everything, running off on my own without Yang might be the worst I’ve ever done.”

_Blake, no._

“I told myself it was just to protect her, a-and it sort of was, but it wasn’t that selfless. I knew all along it was mostly because I was scared, too… and weak, and couldn’t face her yet. I could have just… given it up, maybe left Adam to someone else. I could have been here all these months at Yang’s side – I _should have been._ ”

_Blake, I don’t blame you..._

The faunus continues tearing into herself, following those same old scars to chart her course. “So even if I _did_ stop Adam, I… I still don’t know if it was worth it. Because I could have done more for Yang if I was here, because I’ve got blood on my hands now, and she shouldn’t have to be partners with some self-centered murderer who abandoned her in a time of need… Because I hurt Yang so much, and I’m _so, so sorry_ for leaving her alone!”

Blake smudges the heels of her hands into her eyes and wipes the wetness on her pant legs, sniffling, struggling to comport herself. She hardly even cares that Yang’s listening right now, she can’t be bothered to censor her wording for subtext when she’s finally letting it all spill out over the humble gravesite.

“B-but I _swear,_ I’ll never leave her like that again. I’m stronger with her, and safer, and happier, and she makes me want to be better than I am. I don’t even want to imagine being so far apart anymore! So for as… _Snf…_ For as long as she’ll have me, I’m **_hers._** ”

There’s a thud at her back, and strong, sturdy arms wrap tight around the faunus’ waist, a forehead pressing against her shoulder. The two of them are, understandably, kind of a mess right now, cycling shaky breaths in unison.

Yang doesn’t know what else to say, or whether she trusts herself to finally jump that last boundary. So she just whispers: _“...Good.”_

Neither notices how many minutes pass there, knees in the grass, huddled together under the morning sunshine. However long they stay is however long it takes them to come around the bend from sulking to wordlessly savoring the warmth together.

In fact, they’d probably just sit there ‘til noon trying to unlock the secrets of photosynthesis if they weren’t interrupted by a _bzzt-bzzt_ from Yang’s pocket. A text from her father, checking in on how their little escapade’s going. _Dang it, Tai._

Grumbling, Yang releases Blake, who in turn, also grumbles a bit at being released, chaining into some artfully synchronized cooperative grumbles as the huntresses stretch out their sore legs.

“...Guess Dad’s not going to let us off the hook all day,” Yang sighs, slowly thumbing out a response with the one hand her scroll still easily recognizes for touch-input. Taking one last look at the stone marker, Yang offers the memory of her mother a sad smile. “Bye for now, Mom. Sleep well.”

“It was nice meeting you, Summer. We’ll visit again sometime.”

It doesn’t escape either that Blake said _‘we.’_

A few minutes into their walk back down the winding dirt path of the forest, Yang folds her arms behind her head, aiming for _‘cool ‘n casual’_ and landing somewhere in the vicinity of _‘bomb disposal expert, clippers over the red wire.’_

" _Heeeeeey,_ so... Doooooo you have any plans tonight?"

"Yang…” Blake deadpans, “I'm a broke, homeless, runaway assassin with no active Academy enrollment, crashing in your house on an island I've never visited before, half the world away from my homeland, disconnected from everyone else I’ve ever known in my life. Literally _HOW_ would I have plans?"

Yang flails her fleshy hand in the air beside her, keeping its metal twin rubbing at the back of her neck and laughing dismissively. “Heh, c’mon, just humor me and say you don’t! It’s just… I was just thinking, tonight after Dad's done dropping chores on us, we could... I don't know, go do something? Toooogether? Out in town? Grab dinner?"

No matter how calm the delivery, now matter how plausibly deniable, the proposed plan of action sounds _suspiciously_ framed like a date. Both of them know it, both of them _want_ it to be, _need_ it to be. But even now, after all they’ve just vented out together this morning… Nobody wants to touch the bomb. Nobody wants to clip the red wire.

"...Sounds great. _I'll clear my calendar."_

“Brat.”

**But it’s still a date.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hope that was, y'know, decent and... earned y'all's approval and stuff. y'know. because. I totally don't have a complex about seeking approval or anything, haha, that's SILLY.
> 
> Current overall outline has this fic capping at either 9 chapters, or 10-where-the-last-one's-a-shortish-epilogue. Kinda figure that's the safest way to do it without feeling like I'm bloating it, and then anything else I wanna do in this particular AU taking it further down the timeline, I can tack on as oneshots in a series after this. Since I do have a couple ideas for that, but they're like... not cohesive or anything.
> 
> Next chapter's gonna be longer, though. Next one's gonna be... Pretty Gay. It's almost time. They're almost there!


	8. Let Me Be Your Bumblebee

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's not a date, not officially. They're just deciding to pop into town for a quick bite, maybe take an evening drive. Nobody's said anything about a date.
> 
> ...The Bees go on a date.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> have been staring at this chapter for days and no matter how much I tell myself I'm editing it, I think I've hit my limit, so... here goes nothing.  
> hope it's okay.

It’s a solid ten seconds of coughing for Blake and Yang both, as the latter whips a heavy gray tarp off of the bulky silhouette in the old storage shed, and buffets them with a cloud of dust.

There, in all her glory, lounges Yang’s custom sports bike. Unlike the two of them, Bumblebee looks just about the same now as the last day they’d taken her out for a ride. It’s nice to see something from their past was spared a dramatic character arc these last months.

“Khhkf-! How'd it even get THIS bad?” Blake manages, as soon as she can breathe again.

Yang folds up the tarp and stows it on a rickety wooden shelf. “I mean… I haven’t touched her since the Fall, I didn’t even want to look at her when they dug her out of the garage in Vale, and plus…” She waggles the fingers of her prosthetic. “Handlebars.”

Talk of that night still hurts, obviously, but by this point it’s more like a flat whack to the side of Blake’s head, rather than a skewering stab. Which is… a considerable improvement? She almost touches the sleek, burnt-yellow frame until she second-guesses, not wanting to smudge her unworthy mortal fingers all over the finish.

“And I mean,” Yang continues, popping open the dust tanks, “I know I could have bashed my head against it, done some kind of rig-job to put all the controls over on the one side… Like, I built the thing myself, so of course I could, but…”

“But fixing it to work better with only one arm... would still take _forever_ with only one arm, right?”

Yang clicks her tongue and fires a finger-gun Blake’s way. “Bingo.”

Canister of combustion dust in hand, Yang tops off the primary and backup fuel tanks, then begins a quick inspection. Blake, only having an understanding of weapons engineering rather than vehicular, mostly hovers alongside to fetch and stow tools as needed.

It’s kind of attractive, seeing Yang back in her element, even if it’s not the combat type. _And maybe to extrapolate, to imagine her wiping beads of sweat from her brow, work overalls half-fallen away, face and body lightly smudged with engine grease and –_ And that’s enough of _that_ for now!

Satisfied with the look of the systems, Yang walks her bike out into the yard while Blake locks up the shed. It’s a little ways before sunset, but the sky’s starting to stain with a bit of orange over the far side of the island. They won’t be beating the dinner rush, but Yang’s sworn they aren’t headed anywhere that’ll be too packed.

For their... For their _outing._ Their arguably casual, platonic outing, free of subtext, free of _feelings._ Yes. Indeed.

Taiyang’s out by his truck, unloading bags of groceries into the cabin. When he spots the girls, he transfers the load to one arm and gives the two a greeting.

“You two heading out?” He turns to Yang and points at her, adopting a chastising Big Stern Dad tone that doesn’t fit the man at all. “Be sure to bring her home by midnight!”

Yang gapes, glancing back at Blake for a moment. “Wha--? What’re you giving ME that line for? _She’s_ not your daughter!”

The joke’s sitting right there in the open, it’s beckoning him, pulling him in like a magnet. Taiyang would just _love_ to say, _‘not until you put a ring on it she’s not,’_ but he’s meddled enough as-is.

“Because you’re the one driving, she’s not from around here, and if I remember anything about Ghira Belladonna from the nightly news, he’s not the kind of guy I want ticked off that a responsible adult didn’t make sure she got home at a reasonable hour. Man could break me in half like a hunky toothpick.”

“...Please never describe yourself as ‘hunky’ again.”

“No deal. Xiao Long family tradition.”

Blake snickers behind her hand. “If it’s any consolation, that means you get to be hunky, too?”

_In all fairness, Yang feels that IS a pretty nice consolation, now that it’s Blake who’s saying it._

One last round of pleasantries are exchanged before Tai returns to minding his own business. Yang straddles her bike and gets the engine running, leaning in to listen for any tell-tale sounds of trouble. Nothing but the steady hum of a well-tuned system.

Not until Yang cocks her head back and asks, “You coming or what?” does Blake realize she’s just been standing stock-still, soaking in the scene.

_Right. She actually has to get on._

That presents its own set of emotional challenges; it’s not like she hasn’t done this a few dozen times before, but… but it! It just! It feels like _something_ now, when she mounts the seat behind her partner and snakes her hands in to wrap around that firm waist, feeling the slightest hint of abdominal muscle against her arms from through the shirt.

Similarly, simultaneously, Yang undergoes a series of very animated facial expressions, thankful that Blake can’t see her reaction to having the faunus holding onto her, chest pressed flush against her back, chin on her shoulder. _Brothers, it wasn’t this hard all those times before!_

Yang revs the engines into a slow start, pulling a serpentine to dodge one of Zwei’s stray dog toys before aligning herself with the dirt path off the property.

“So, hey, your Dad’s... not actually THAT huge, is he?”

Blake says nothing.

“Uh. Blakey? Could reeeeeally use some reassurance here.”

“Well, he’s… he's not quite as big as an Alpha Beowolf, if that helps?”

“...Heh. Cool.” _Yeah, not cool. Even IF Blake says he's a pacifist.  
_

Taiyang waves the pair off as they zip down the country road, slow enough as they get their bearings, then kick into high gear as soon as they hit proper pavement.

If Qrow were still here, he’d get the grumpy old bird gambling on whether or not those two’ll have sorted themselves out by the end of the night. Right now, he likes his odds.

* * *

Yang had hummed and hawed over where exactly to drag her partner for dinner, especially with the indecision over just how schmancy she’s willing to risk getting for this _completely platonic hangout between two gal pals_ to maintain platonic plausibility. On one hand, she wanted to impress Blake with a little local culture, but then, that local culture’s not exactly high-brow. Still, it’s _Blake_ , and she knows her partner isn’t the type who needs her to put on too many affectations.

So, Yang doubles right down and veers them onto a street just off the main thoroughfare of town, a stone’s throw from the edge of the dockyards, to the kind of place Blake and Weiss always passively protested hitting up back in Vale, yet always seemed to secretly enjoy once the sisters cajoled them.

The humble greasy-spoon diner by the name of _Char’s Broiler_ is a Patch mainstay, changing up hands and names now and again throughout the decades but never losing its homey luster. Burgers and breakfast food at all hours of the day, or at least whatever hours the proprietress feels bothered to keep the lights on.

Popular urban legends say the current owner once found a hungry Ursa Minor rooting around in the dumpster one misty morning, and beat it back with a buttered-up skillet. Obviously, any huntress is gonna know Grimm don’t need food for sustenance, and it would take more than a light clonking with a frypan to send one packing, but hey, it’s fun to play make-believe. Adds to the aesthetic.

Blake slips off the bike and stretches, thumbs pressed into the small of her back. She waits for Yang to take the lead, then slips into step just behind. Yang catches her eyeing the environs with more curiosity than _‘ick, this is lame,’_ so that’s a point in her favor!

A dry-erase placard on a steel standee near the entrance exclaims to ‘Seat Yourself!’ and they readily comply, Blake’s habits drifting them towards the rear corner booth, furthest away from the strangers at the packed counter stools. They barely have time to slide in at the table and leaf through the menus before a loud gasp steals their attention.

“By the Brothers, it is! Yang Xiao Long, as I live and breathe!”

Sweeping around the counter to greet them is a kindly, middle-aged woman with a disarming grin, clad in a red-and-white-striped waitress uniform Blake swears was pulled from the set of a sitcom from her parents’ generation, with a big chef’s apron to match. She’s portly, but on the tall side, with fading yellow-green hair tucked in a hairnet and a welcoming presence as big as her silhouette. On her chest, a ketchup-stained nametag reads – in the most immaculate calligraphic handwriting – _‘Chartreuse.’_

“Hey, Char,” says Yang.

“We were so worried about you after Vytal – you know, we never believed the nonsense about that Mercury boy – but you haven’t stuck your nose in for ages! And now you’re back with a date!”

Going with the flow, Yang begins to mechanically respond out of politeness, “Yeah, I figured I’d bring her since–“ Right up until she realizes she’s just answered in the affirmative.

A bit of nosy joking around’s just part of her customer service persona, so Char hadn’t placed too much stock in the newcomer _actually_ being Yang’s brand new beau. There’s an awed change in her demeanor from the moment Yang unintentionally confirms her… intentions.

“Oh, and she’s _gorgeous!_ Howdy, hon, I’m Chartreuse, but payin’ customers can call me Char. I’d offer t’shake your hand and all, but I’ve been in the kitchen – Now, I’ve known Yang and her family since she was a tyke; you look a mite familiar, but I can’t say I’ve seen you around these parts, you’re not a local, are you?”

The onslaught of hospitality batters Blake into a bit of awkward stammering, but she pushes through to eke out an introduction. “Hello. I’m… Ah. No, I’m from Menagerie; I’m… I was. Am? Yang’s partner at Beacon.”

“Aw, the good ol’ _Partners-to-Partners_ story! Y’know, I always said those Huntsman Academies were just big ol’ matchmaking services – The whole Grimm thing was just a cover. Maybe I shoulda enrolled back when I was your age!” Char has herself a hearty laugh, and pulls out a small scratchpad and pencil. “Now I’m startin’ to remember, saw a bit of you in the four-on-four round. But I’ll get out of your hair so’s you two can settle in. Know what you’re hungry for?”

Yang figures it’s been long enough since she was last here, so she goes in for her old Signal-era favorite to compensate, the #3 house special of a barbecue bacon cheeseburger and soda. Slightly less adventurous, Blake opts for a less-sauce-slathered burger on sourdough toast, with a tiny order of fries and a plain iced tea – the finest tea one can expect on a menu like this.

“So…” Yang says, scrunching and un-scrunching the paper wrapper from her straw, soon as Char’s dealt out their drinks.

Blake satisfies her own fidgeting urge by tying her wrapper into a tiny knot. “Yeah. So. Date, huh?”

“H-hey, I didn’t say it! She said it first, that was all her!”

“But you DID say yes when she _thought_ it was.”

Yang waggles her arms and makes some exasperated, nonsensical noise before she slows, settles, and more solemnly asks, “Is it… _that bad_ that I said yes?”

The entire rowdy restaurant seems to grow still around them.

“...It’s not bad at all.”

“So that – that means you’re okay that this is a… that we’re…” Yang points lamely between the two of them, then waves at the whole surrounding diner. “On a d… a date.”

_“Yang.”_

Yang looks up, but doesn’t make it to meet Blake’s eyes. She only gets halfway, to the point she spots her partner’s hands reaching in to grasp her own in the middle of the table.

“I’m… I’ve wanted this for a long time. To try… you know. _Us. Like this._ So **yes,** I’m glad you finally said something, even if it _was_ a total accident. _”_ Blake finally catches her gaze, and the faunus’ is serious, and vulnerable, but _hopeful_ in a way Yang hasn’t seen her since she arrived.

_The bomb has been defused. The crowds cheer, confetti is thrown. Fields of lilies bloom._

“...Wow,” Yang says dumbly, blinking at their linked hands. “Now I really feel like a doof for dragging you to a dinky ol’ diner.” She keeps the last words low and sneaky, fearful of offending Char. “If I knew my odds were _this_ good, we could’ve gone for like… fancy Atlesian food, or something.”

“Does Patch even _have_ real fancy Atlesian food, or would we be at _Garlic Garden_ right now?” Blake snarks back, “And if you had, would the staff still be so overly-familiar they’d’ve asked if we were on a date and kicked things off to begin with?” She loosens one hand to grab her drink, and sips her tea with a smile. “Besides, you’re not trying to flirt with Weiss, here. It’s just me.”

Yang makes a silent laugh and comes out beaming, giving Blake’s palm a squeeze. “Nothing ‘just’ about you, Belladonna.”

The door back into the kitchen swings open not long afterwards, and out toddles the proprietress deftly balancing their orders on a tray, one-handed. “Not to break up the hand-holdin’, but I expect you two actually want to feed your faces,” says Char, and she starts to set out their plates.

Immediately, Blake is doubly glad she wussed out of lazily saying _‘same’_ to whatever Yang had gotten for herself – the portion sizes here are gargantuan, and she’s pretty sure that single sizzling burger’s got more calories than the average civilian burns in a day and a half. It barely fits on the plate, only JUST enough that the warm hickory sauce and melty cheese dribbling down the sides hasn’t begun to pool right onto the table mat. 

Her own’s more approachable in both size and mess-quotient, and paired with a basket lined with checkered paper, piled high with a mound of shoestring fries. Though she swears she’d asked for a _tiny_ order of fries, not a _massive_ order of _tiny_ fries…!

Combined, the savory scent of their meals has her stomach give a ravenous growl, and Chartreuse bursts out in a belly-laugh. “Guess I’ll take that as a compliment! Dig in, now, and holler when you’re done.”

Modestly embarrassed, Blake scrunches herself deep down into her seat and flattens out her ears, before any of the other customers can turn their heads. This makes it pretty troublesome to eat, though, so she’s forced to concede to the whims of her hunger. That, and… she’s discovered she doesn’t mind getting chuckled at quite so much when it’s Yang doing it. _Sounds too pretty._

Neither huntress has had a burger since Beacon, save one time Yang halfheartedly noshed on some cold leftovers Tai had brought back with him one night. That can’t possibly compare to the first bite of one fresh-made, hot and juicy. She and Blake both loudly hum their satisfaction around a mouthful, and conversation stalls until they’ve gotten further underway.

Yang lowers her burger to tug a napkin from the tabletop dispenser, dabbing at the barbecue-smears on her lips. “Say, if this IS a date… then I totally reserve the right to do something super cute and domestic, like steal some of your fries.“

The faunus eyes her suspiciously, visibly amused. “Except you’ve always done that _anyway!_ ‘It’s just Partner Privilege, Blake!’ ‘I’m the driver, so I need extra energy to keep alert, Blake!’”

“Heh… right, forgot about that,” Yang snorts, “Guilty as charged.”

It still feels _different_ going for Blake’s fries when she does it now. And Blake sure feels _different_ about having them stolen. Neither is complaining.

Most of the rest of the meal passes in companionable silence, with only a few intermissions in munching for Yang to fill Blake in about the history of the diner, any hot local gossip about Char, that age-old tale of the Dumpster Ursa.

It’s pleasant, it’s low-stakes, and it’s right – far from the imminent dread of friendship-sinking catastrophe both figured would flourish the _nanosecond_ any romantic intentions were whispered. It’s somehow easy as can be to just fall into it, let the current carry them like they’d been casually dating all along. Maybe they were, and everyone else just forgot to fill them in.

Yang calls for the check, and manages to talk them out of staying for a dessert, though she fails to convince Char not to give them a little date discount on the grounds of _‘looking too darn cute together.’_ She just… pinkens a bit, nods along, and stuffs the change into her pocket.

“So, _obviously_ I wasn’t expecting Char to break the ice like that, but… S’actually making it easier on me, because I don’t know HOW I was gonna excuse the next place I wanted to take you without it… _definitely_ seeming like a date.”

Now that perks Blake’s ears right up. “Oh, really? Do I get a hint?”

Yang slides out of the booth and adjusts her jacket, offering Blake a hand up with her prosthetic. “Hmm. I could always tell you stuff it’s _not?_ It’s… not a carnival, not a rodeo, it’s not an arcade… hope you’re not too disappointed yet, I can keep going! Not a renaissance fair, not a trade show...”

Blake giggles. Honestly giggles, and _that_ makes Yang’s heart do a triple-beat.

“Just leave it a surprise.”

* * *

The sun’s well and truly setting by the time the pair say their goodbyes to Char through the pan-cluttered window back into the kitchen, and meander back onto the parking lot to grab Bumblebee.

The _Great Feats Of Stalwart Emotional Restraint_ go a whole lot quicker this time around, as they mount up and Blake wraps herself around Yang’s back. Now that they know they can get away with it, don’t have to hide how much they enjoy the close contact. The bent cardboard nub at the edge of the puzzle piece has been straightened out, and it fits right into place.

They chat for a while while they’re still moving at the slower city speed limit, Yang pointing out little landmarks in town, old places she and the family used to go. She’s not even scared to mention Summer now, her name floats up more easily, those memories made a little less jagged thanks to their visit this morning. Blake nods along, fulfilling her obligations as The Quieter One and mostly only making side commentary or popping a few questions to keep Yang talking.

_So what if she likes the sound of her voice? They’re dating. Or. On a date, at least. That means it’s fair play!_

Bumblebee picks up from a putter to a beautiful roar once Yang navigates them north of town, only one or two stop signs before they’re cruising down the coastline freeway.

Yang really lets ‘er rip now, allowing the frantic flare of the engines and burst of speed to match the state of her heart tonight, wind whipping both huntress’ hair in a trailing, tangling flag behind them as they burn down the road.

Blake’s sure they’ve never gone this fast before, with their previous trips into town almost always staying within the grid of Vale. She’s never gotten to see Bumblebee in her prime, but she’s not scared, not tempted to tap Yang’s side and nag her to tone it down.

She just squeezes _tighter,_ folding herself into her partner to become one big, black-and-yellow blur shooting through the night.

* * *

They roll to a stop in the middle of absolute nowhere, as far as Blake can see. It’s been a while since they’ve seen a street sign, and only one or two gravel paths branching off to rural houses and who-knows-where. They haven’t broken off from the coastline, though the cliffs here vary wildly in height, more jagged than the flat, easy slope out by Summer’s resting place.

Yang pops out her scroll and flips on the flashlight just-in-case – now that it’s dark enough the stars are winking into place – and waves Blake along. The faunus is just fine with her nightvision, even less likely to stumble than her human partner, _but you know what? Maybe she’ll just hold Yang’s hand anyway._

They head through a small clump of trees, Blake picking out increasingly frequent bits of discarded construction materials and strewn cinderblocks, half-poured cement foundations. A minute later, they hit a thick chickenwire fence, speckled to and fro with severely rusty signage screaming **[STOP], [KEEP OUT],** and **[INTRUDERS WILL BE PROSECUTED].**

“Not afraid to be a rulebreaker, are you?” Yang asks over her shoulder.

“Yang. _Freedom fighter. Terrorist. Assassin._ Has that really not sunk in yet?”

“Mmm, it’s starting to. Up we go, Blakey!”

The duo scramble over the fence with ease, though it does earn a groan once Blake spies a small hole in the fence they could’ve just… crawled through, not ten feet down the line. _Then again, it looks kind of kid-sized._

The fence doesn’t seem to be fencing off anything important at first, running straight into a flat cliff face of craggy rock. Yang is undeterred, just edging along the wall until she shouts “A-ha!” and waves for Blake to hustle up.

It’s a cave, a small one, but navigable by adults without clubbing them over the head with claustrophobia. Inside, the ground slopes downwards, roughly a floor-and-a-half’s worth of careful shuffling with hands pressed against the rough walls to avoid a slip.

But then they hit the bottom, where it evens out, and Blake understands.

The thin tunnel opens up wide, into a larger chamber, almost entirely enclosed but for the far wall – a broad arch naturally carved out of the rock by eons of water-wear, an open door right out into the ocean, with the waves swelling up to fill the shoals inside the cave with glistening seafoam. The view of the horizon is a bright velvety blue, the stars on display untouched by city light pollution. The reflections coming off the surface seem to shimmer across the walls, giving it a dreamlike quality.

Most of the chamber from the middle onward transitions from flat rock into smooth sand. The water washing in only comes up to Blake’s ankles, every step a little splash.

“It’s beautiful,” Blake whispers, drawing a swirl in the sand with the toe of her boot. “Is this… do people know about this place?”

Yang _tries_ not to look like she’s totally heaving a sigh of relief that her dumb trip idea wasn’t a bust. “Sorta-kinda, but not anymore?” She shrugs. “Yeah, must’ve been… I dunno, twenty years ago? Fifteen? Apparently city council was in a rush to put up a new lighthouse, and they got a bit of the base built up above us before some random dude on their lunch break bumped into a crack he thought could be a cave.” She gestures to the large opening out into the sea.

“They said they’d dug a bit just to see – like, that tunnel we just came down? – And found the hollow. Had to scrap the project pretty quick, since they figured it’d be cheaper to just build somewhere else than fill the whole thing in with supports so it didn’t collapse, plus the cost of like, always comin’ down here to make sure they weren’t eroded, all that junk.” Yang rests her hands on her hips, surveying the sea. “But hey, their loss is our gain, right?”

Blake makes an affirmative noise, and lightly kicks her heel, making another splash. She’s starting to feel nostalgic, drawn back to those pre-Fang years of untainted childhood, scampering across the beaches of Kuo Kuana. “So, what, they abandoned a perfectly good date spot, and you… happened to wander into it one day?”

Crouching down over at the edge of the water, Yang starts to unlace her boots, kicking them off and bundling up her socks inside. “Yeah, I was just exploring, y’know? Like kids do! So, I see a cool cave, and I’m like, ‘awesome! I’m not gonna think about how dangerous this is!’ Only other person I took down here was Ruby a couple times, so we could hunt for shells and hermit crabs ‘n stuff. Dad didn’t wanna, he nagged about the rules and all, but he didn’t, like, _ban_ us from coming.”

Quickly succumbing to peer pressure, Blake does the same and doffs her own boots, wading out into the middle of the secret shoals where Yang is standing.

“So, yeah. It’s… It just ended up being this really nice secret spot I only wanted to share with people I cared about, so… Other than them, you’re the only one who knows about it. Ssssurprise?” Yang spreads her arms wide and waggles some jazz-hands, grimacing a smidge. Is this whole thing charming enough? Is Blake charmed? Hopefully she’s…

_Oh. Yep, that’s charmed._

Blake is _utterly and wholly_ charmed, her faunus eyes literally glowing gold in the dim light of the cave, wide, awestruck, and damp. Her lower lip wiggles a bit. She almost looks like she’s going to cry…? Yang can’t abide _that,_ so she steps in close on impulse, hands laid gently on Blake’s shoulders.

“Hey. You alright?”

 _She’s feeling more than alright._ Here, in this private place, this little sanctuary away from the stresses of a Post-Fall world, all of the day’s pent up emotions, all of the _last year’s_ pent up emotions, all rush Blake down like a wave crashing straight in from the ocean, submerging her in that feeling that strains her chest. Words threatening to bubble out like that last lungful of oxygen. Looking for a lifeboat, her arms come around to link behind Yang’s back, holding herself close so she isn’t swept away.

Really close. They’re… They’re closer than they actually _intended_ to be, all of a sudden. Every detail of their faces, their expressions, the depths inside their eyes filling the other’s vision, illuminated only by the ambient dusklight and the thin scroll flashlight in Yang’s jacket pocket.

“Yang…”

“Blake.”

They both have so much to say, more than they even realize, more than can possibly be done in a single night. Even so, one sentiment’s most crucial of all, and for the life of her, Blake can’t hold back anymore.

“I lov–“

Yang moves first, compelled by the flood of absolute adoration that breaks through the dam and drives her forward, sealing the gap between their lips. As soon as Blake’s brain is capable of processing anything other than bliss, she pushes back, firm and insistent.

Their very first kiss tastes like bacon burgers, barbecue sauce, salt and citrus soda. It’s messy, lopsided, their teeth clack a little bit. It’s clumsy, and rushed, and tentative.

_It is, undoubtedly, the single most romantic kiss Blake has experienced in her life._

Memories of false affection, of surviving on scraps of intimacy that could so quickly turn to anger, memories of what Adam had lied and called love begin to burn away in the unyielding blaze that is _Yang._ A controlled burn, clearing out the dead wood and making way for new life.

Yang, for her part, is no less enraptured. Memories of loss, of abandonment, of utter emptiness can’t keep eating away at her, when Blake gets rid of that gaping void and makes her feel so _full._

She’s here, she _wants_ to be here, she wants to be _more,_ to give and take and share and _be everything they can be, together._ Not two broken shells, incomplete and lesser in the absence of the other, but two individual wholes, creating something even greater than the sum of their parts, as partners.

The two pull away from their awkward, amateurish kiss, panting softly, stunned into a long silence.

 _Crud, wait,_ Yang was probably supposed to say something cool, just then! Slapping on a cocky smirk, she beams down at Blake and slyly murmurs, “I know.”

Eyes wet with properly happy tears, for the first time in _gods know how long_ , Blake sputters a choked-up laugh and lightly headbutts the edge of Yang’s jaw, before nuzzling into it. “You _ass!_ You didn’t even let me finish…!”

“You can give it another go, if you wanna! I’m all ears. Only half as many as you, but, pff.”

This absolute dork, this beautiful soul, Blake means it down to the depths of her own when she straightens up, blinks away the dew, stares Yang dead on and whispers, _“I love you.”_

Sass can take a backseat, just for a second. A bit damp in the eye herself, Yang sighs happily and answers: “Yeah. _I love you too, Blake._ Always will.”

“...That’s more like it.”

The two hold each other, standing still as the water licks around their ankles, neither really wanting to let go. With that in mind, Yang’s struck with a thought.

“But you’re right, actually, I went a little too quick. Kinda skipped a few steps, ‘cuz before we got to… _that,_ I was gonna do this, first.”

Reaching for the scroll in her pocket, Yang flicks her wrist to pop it all the way open, and thumbs at the screen. Blake can’t get a good view from this angle, and plus, the flashlight still being on unintentionally blinds her.

A few seconds and agitated grunts of _‘Come on, hurry up…’_ later, the scroll begins to pump out the sound of smooth, contemplative piano music, with just a hint of acid jazz flair, out of its speaker.

Yang stuffs it back in her pocket – muffling it a bit on top of its already tinny audio quality – and returns her arms to link around Blake’s shoulders. Only loosely sticking to the tune, she begins to sway them gently in place, back and forth, bare feet shuffling in the sand. Blake’s grip around Yang’s middle tightens, and she leans in to rest her forehead against the blonde’s collarbone.

“Sorta ruined my own plan there, but hey, I think it turned out alright.”

“Mm-hmm... So do I. You going to keep being this romantic, Xiao Long? Or is this just a one-time deal?”

“Stick around and find out, Belladonna,” Yang quips, resting her chin snugly between those fuzzy, fwippy ears atop the faunus’ head.

They languidly spin and swerve and draw patterns in the sand for a few peaceful minutes, before Yang is clocked with another little detail she’d forgotten for tonight.

_Oh, wait. ‘Sticking around.’ Speaking of which…_

“Heeeey, so. I, um. I know this totally isn’t the best time for serious stuff when we just got all ooey-gooey, but… I was gonna talk to you about something.”

Aw, and she was just getting comfy, too. Blake draws away so she can quirk a brow. “Ominous, but go on.”

“N-nothing THAT bad! I was just…” Yang takes in a breath of sea-salt breeze and pushes onward. “I can’t just stay in Patch forever. I… want to go to Mistral. To find–” _To find Ruby? Or find Raven? She isn’t certain herself._ “I can’t sit around doing nothing when the others are still out there. We’ve got half of Team RWBY back together, but…”

That’s not _too_ surprising to Blake. “I know. I was going to ask you one of these days, if you ever had plans to go after them. Head for Haven.”

“Yeah. I feel like I’m almost ready now. I just needed to tell you, since… I know Dad’ll be glad to let you stay, if you don’t want to come, or like, help out if you needed to get travel arrangements back to Menagerie or something, since–“

Blake flicks Yang right in the forehead.

“You finally ask me out, sweep me off my feet, make me feel _right_ again, and you think there’s even a _chance_ I won’t be going along with you?” she asks, feigning insult. Maybe _actually_ feeling a teensy bit insulted, but not enough to cloud her emotions. “Wherever you’re headed… I’m headed too. No matter what.”

Yang’s shaky smile evens out into something solid, and she dips inward, crown of her head resting right against her partner’s. She feels silly for even letting those old doubts back in.

"I’ve got the best, cutest, awesome-est girlfriend on the friggin’ face of Remnant."

Blake’s instinctual refusal to accept _ANY_ of those compliments comes second to the question she hesitantly blurts out, looking up through her lashes. "Are we...? Officially? Girlfriends?"

"W-well, I mean, if you _want_ to be?"

The faunus shakes her head, which given their position, just nuzzles them together even more. "What did I already tell you? About _how long_ I've wanted this?"

"Heh. Fair point. Kinda getting late though, d’you… wanna head back soon, or…?"

Blake turns, staring out at the starfield over the moonlit sea, through the frame of the arched cave entrance. Stares at her _girlfriend_ **(!!!)** , and the softened silhouette she cuts in the moody ambiance, as they swish and sway in their lazy slow-dance.

“...Not yet. Let’s enjoy this. Just a little bit longer.”

“It’s like you read my mind.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whoa, it's like they're super-gay for each other or something. Who'd'a thunk it?
> 
> hope that was... decent. my capacity to write keeps tanking even more now that I'm try'na finish up these two fics I've had ongoing since late Nov/Early Dec so... I dunno. Just want to wrap them up sufficiently sweetly and ... maybe by the time they're done I'll have gotten better inspiration or a sense of direction or magically know what people will actually want to read so I can (assuming a miracle) write it and maybe they'll like me a lot. bleep bloop.
> 
> Next chapter's putting a bow on the girls' time in Patch, squaring things away for their journey, and then a short lil' epilogue to finish off the story. And then if any of the little flickers of maybe-ideas for how this AU would alter V5 and V6 events coalesce into something more solid people might read, I'll... just tack them on into a series after-the-fact.
> 
> for tonight ... um ... i dunno. im. just gonna eat some trail mix and kinda sit under a blanket for a while. seeya.


	9. Final Preparations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As much as they'd love to revel in the evolution of their relationship, they both know they've got larger goals ahead of them. Mistral beckons, and the Bees need to be ready... and maybe sneak in some snuggles, when and where they can.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kinda sad seeing them about to leave Patch... But they can't stay there forever. Kinda... probably not as emotional-payoffy as last chapter and having them actually fess up, since that's always special, but, y'know. Just... posting before I psych myself out more.

**CLANG.**

**CLA-CLANG.**

_Fwooooosh-ssshhhhhhhkssh._

If the heat of the forges in Signal Academy’s weaponsmithing workshop weren’t already searing enough, it’s positively sweltering standing there side by side with Yang.

Taiyang hadn’t been surprised at all when they’d relayed the developments of their not-a-date date night, both in that they’re together – _“Finally; I thought I was gonna have to lock you two in a closet!”_ – and that Yang truly planned to mount up for Mistral in the coming days, new faunus girlfriend in tow.

The first overjoyed him, and the second, while birthing some sarcastic complaints about being left all alone in the nest again, was taken in stride. Even if it meant returning to a lonely life of microwave dinners and grading papers with no one but Zwei for company, he claimed what was best for his daughters was to have Team RWBY together again.

But before the pair could brave a cross-continental voyage straight into the thick of danger, a few boxes still needed to be ticked off.

Blake couldn’t cut through the Grimm-infested, bandit-swarmed jungles with a broken blade, and Yang still had a few upgrades in mind to trick up her prosthetic for live combat.

Joking about _‘Bring Your Daughter-and-daughter’s-girlfriend To Work Day,’_ Tai piled them all in his rattletrap truck and drove the trio down to Signal Academy, leveraging his professorship to allow the girls a free pass for rummaging around the school and using its facilities while he teaches his weekday classes.

Once the students for the morning weaponsmithing block had filed out, Blake and Yang made themselves comfortable at the forges, dumping their tools, materials, and existing weaponry out on the tables.

It’s been a long couple of hours since then: hammering, wiring, soldering, welding. Yang has less repair work on her plate, but working on her arm unfortunately requires removing it first – not that she hadn’t teased about double-dog-daring to rip right into its internal mechanisms while still plugged in. She got a smack on the shoulder for that, well-deserved.

Through Blake’s aid, Yang’s gotten the bulk of her own work squared away, at least all that she needed to be re-amputated for. Now, she can assist her girlfriend in joining _Gambol Shroud’s_ broken body back together as one.

Blake, while GRATEFUL for Yang’s help and expertise, does wish it was a bit less… _distracting,_ having Yang hovering closeby, stripped down to cargo pants and a flimsy tank top, the heat and exertion leaving a fair sheen of sweat across her skin that has her _glistening_ in the light of the furnace.

_It’s a miracle Blake hasn’t hammered one of her thumbs flat, or fumbled the tongs._

At the end of it all, with one final dip into the quench tank, the fruits of her labor can be drawn up and displayed proudly next to Yang’s.

_Gambol Shroud’s_ functionality has been restored, the workings of the pistol grip and transformation sequence ironed back out after the catastrophic overload during her final duel with Adam. The blade, sharp and shining, is rejoined at the core with a thread of golden alloy. Blake’s intentional implementation of such blatant symbolism didn’t go unseen, and Yang had to halt the process for a minute just to smooch her partner silly.

_Ember Celica’s_ combat capabilities have now been fully replicated in Yang’s prosthetic, the old spare gauntlet now set aside as a simple backup. The transformation time has been shaved down, the receiver’s gauge matched to chamber the same ammunition for battlefield convenience. And not one to be outdone in meaningful aesthetic flair… Painted a brilliant gold, the dull and lifeless chrome overridden with something better befitting a Yang Xiao Long now back in business.

Two strong weapons, for two strengthened huntresses. A representation, a part of the self, of the soul. Reforged and renewed.

Civilians might not _get_ just why the moment’s so emotional, why after a minute of contemplation, Blake practically leaps into Yang’s arm – singular at present – and hugs herself in tight. Even with her more-sensitive faunus nose, it doesn’t dissuade her one bit that they’re both sweaty and grease-stained, reeking of machine oil and elemental dust residue.

_Because they’re finally fixing things. Their weapons. Themselves. Each other._

They stay wrapped up in their precious moment until a violent belch of flame from a nearby furnace reminds them they should _probably_ close up shop before a furious workshop instructor tears their freshly-mended selves back into shreds.

* * *

“So Char’s the only reason you fessed up? Sounds about right,” Tai laughs, glancing over his shoulder at the selfsame diner a few blocks in the distance.

Yang slugs her dad in the arm. “Aw, shut up! She just… sped things along, that’s all!”

A cross-continental journey takes supplies, supplies means shopping, and shopping, in Patch, oftentimes means the boardwalk. The small marketplace splayed out around, and branching off the coast from the docks, is smattered with all sorts of stalls and storefronts where the deals are cheaper than the larger chains and department stores further into town... Provided one knows how to haggle.

“It’s not like I was making much progress myself,” Blake admits sheepishly, her left hand linked with Yang’s right, the sleek metal digits already feeling natural to her, right at home threaded between her own. “I don’t know how long it would’ve taken me otherwise, or if I would have been able to risk it at all.”

The conversation is blown astray by the blast of a foghorn, as a new craft pulls into port. The passenger ship that will be setting sail for southwest Mistral in the morning, with another two intrepid huntresses aboard.

Yang covers her eyes with her free hand to squint at the name emblazoned above the bow. “Aaaand looks like that’s our ride. I’m gonna go square things away for tomorrow, be right back!”

She dips in to press a smooch to Blake’s cheek before she darts off towards the ship, to go double-check with the captain and dockmaster that everything’s settled: a room and garage slot reserved ahead of time.

“Don’t leave us hangin’ too long!” Tai calls after her, and settles backwards against the rail, leaning on his elbows. Blake figures it’s best not to wander too far, and does the same, gazing off at the sea.

Taiyang begins to rummage in his pockets for something, now that he’s stricken by a thought. “Oh, by the way, speaking of tomorrow… Something else I need to give you girls before you go. Wouldn’t wanna leave it ‘til morning and forget.”

Pivoting to slouch on just one arm, Blake tilts her head, and quirks an ear in turn. “What is it…?”

“Figured it’s better you two have it now, before you girls start hitting the shops.” Tai produces an old leather wallet – the type given as a lazy holiday gift and consigned to the closet for years – which, upon Blake’s cursory examination, is packed to the brim with colorful lien cards.

_High denominations, too. Must be at least Ⱡ10,000 in there._

Blake blinks at the cold hard cash, then immediately does what she does best: Deflects. “Mr. Xiao Long, I can’t accept this–”

“Firstly: C’mon, I’m _Tai!_ We’ve been over this, and _especially_ if you’re dating my little girl! Second: It’s already yours, Blake. You earned it.”

“But I haven’t even done anything worth–“

“It’s the bounty payout.”

Blake swallows hard. “Huh? Bounty? As in, for…?” For _Him._ “But how!? I never submitted any claims.”

Tai returns his hands to his pockets, leaving Blake to leaf through the lien in disbelief. “It was Yang’s idea, really. After she saw that bit on the news, about how nobody’s come forward to take it? She sorta thought you should have it to help take care of yourself, just in case you didn’t want to head to Mistral with her.” He lets his head loll back, grinning smugly at the sky. “Now, _I told her_ that wasn’t gonna happen, but she was bein’ a worrywart. Guess you’re rubbing off on her!”

Make that _Ⱡ15,000,_ Blake’s still counting. “I’ve been with her almost the entire time since I got here, when did she send it…?”

“Oh, she couldn’t have done it herself, even if she wanted to,” Tai explains. “Wouldn’t have been able to clear it with the Huntsman’s Guild. Gotta remember, the two of you weren’t ever officially licensed before Beacon went belly-up, and trainees can’t claim open bounties on their own.”

_Stupid red tape._ Tai still remembers that rule being a pain in the ass back in STRQ’s Beacon days, the time they’d lucked into a criminal by chance on a training mission in the mountains their second year, only to find the sweet, sweet pay for bagging the guy was forfeit.

“...So, a little before you two’s trip out to see Summer, she asked if I’d do her a solid and take the proof down into town, to the Guild branch office here in Patch. Remember the night I said I forgot my scroll down at Signal and took off for a bit? I mean, okay, I technically DID forget my scroll down there, but I wasn’t _just_ headed to the school.”

Blake can finish tallying it all up later; she folds up the packed wallet and stuffs it into her jacket. “I would have thought they’d want to keep it all, if you took it to them, but it was all still there when we…” _Chucked it off a cliff? It was such an emotional milestone for them, but it probably sounds dumb as bricks to anyone who wasn’t there._

Tai shrugs. “Nah, only wanted to keep one of the shards afterwards, but I s’pose it makes sense you didn’t notice just the one. They took some pictures, ran all their bio-scans for DNA on file, the works. Blood samples from the smears, a chip of the mask for material analysis. Took a few days to process, y’know, spotty connections these days, but the main office still signed off on it.”

That a DNA scan was involved worries Blake a bit, considering they’d undoubtedly found some of her own blood in the process, given how that battle had gone. But… then again, this was Adam. Like as not they’d find traces of a dozen people alongside her own, even his allies.

“So, they think it was you who went after him, then? That you were the one who brought him down?”

With a flat, clinical tone, Tai drawls, “In the eyes of the world, one Huntsman Taiyang Xiao Long carried out the Dead-or-Alive contract on one Adam Taurus. Likely secondary motivations: Revenge for grievously harming his daughter.” He pauses, then makes a fist, smirking down at it. “Despite the fact his wounds wouldn’t’ve tracked with my style, like, _at all,_ and eyewitnesses would’ve said they’d never seen me before in their lives. I think they just wanted to stick a bow on it and call it done. No reason to think you’ll ever get dragged into the spotlight, kiddo. You can relax.”

How’d he read her mind like that? Is she THAT transparent? “That’s… thank you,” she murmurs, staring down at the warped wooden planks of the boardwalk landing. “I never wanted any money or fame for what I did… Never even thought about it, that people might want to find me, until I saw that news report. I only wanted…”

“You wanted to make things safe again. For you and Yang both. I know,” Tai nods, tilting his head to squint over at the ships, checking to see if he can spot his daughter as a blonde blip in the crowd. “And maybe someday, if we need to fix the story, we can. But for now… You won’t have anyone getting nosy, and you two’ve got some spending money for the trip.”

Blake goes Yang-hunting as well; they manage to pick her out as she finishes up with the ship’s captain and starts her way back over.

Still feeling a bit _Dad Talk-ey,_ Tai figures he should squeeze out his last serious thought before his daughter arrives and the two’re back to getting goo-goo over each other, wherein he’ll be legally forbidden from harshing their fun.

“At first… I was afraid your whole relationship with Yang reminded me of mine with Raven. How things were sweet for a while, then she left without a word,” he starts, and Blake isn’t quite sure what to prepare for. It started with a qualifier, with a ‘but’ hanging in the air, so it can’t be too ominous, right?

“Instead… I’m seeing you guys’re a lot more like me and Summer. Where she only left because she believed she was going on a mission that would help keep the world safe… keep _us_ safe.”

Not as harsh a mood-shift as she feared, after all, and it goes along with all Yang’s told her. Blake gives a little hum of acknowledgment. “Sounds about right.”

“And sure, I loved Summer more than anything, but… Thing is, Blake, I don’t want you reminding me of her _too much._ Because even if she made that choice out of love, even with the best intentions, in the end Yang still lost her, too.”

_Ow. There it is, there’s the dagger-twist._

Taiyang turns to face the faunus fully, lowering his voice, but speaking more plaintively than she’s ever heard him. “All I’m tryin’ to say is… You made it back to her _this time,_ and that’s great, that’s awesome, but… don’t be too much like Summer. Be the one who stays with her. Someone who always comes back.”

“I will.” Because of COURSE she will. “I don’t think I could leave her if I wanted to, and I don’t know how I _could_ ever want to when she makes me feel like this. Safe. Wanted. More than just some _messed-up stray._ ”

Blake runs through a deep breath, then, overpowering her frequent aversion to eye contact, locks dead-on with Taiyang. “It’s like I told her before… as long as she wants me, I’m hers. I’m not going to break that vow.”

_Yeah, this girl’s a keeper,_ he thinks to himself.

Fully-aware he’s kinda-sorta-definitely dampened the mood on what was otherwise going to be a fun, family-friendly trip to shop and snag some dinner, Tai knows just the remedy for being a bummer!

“Ooh! Practicing your vows already? I knew you were serious about my daughter, but _yowza,_ you move quick!”

Blake’s face is splashed a cherry-red, her rapidfire stammering cut short when a very huggy Yang sneaks up from behind and overloads her.

“Hey, what’re you saying to her over here? You’re outta your jurisdiction, old man; embarrassing my girlfriend’s MY job now!” she nags at her dad, who pushes up off the railing and stretches his back.

“Ha, well, when you’re right, you’re right. I’ll just have to embarrass the both of you at the same time.”

Yang just clutches Blake tighter, as if her big strong arms can stave off the _indignity._ “Get your hits in now; once we’re gone you’ll be back to embarrassing yourself.”

Tai grabs tightly at his chest, twisting up his shirt and miming a critical blow! “How can my own flesh and blood be so cruel…?!”

Internally, he just attributes it all to Raven’s genes, and chuckles under his breath. “C’mon, let’s grab some grub before we get back to the shops; we can pig out all we want and pretend we’ll just be walking it off after. Plus, I’d feel like a pretty lousy host if I let Blake leave the island before checking out a restaurant classy enough to have a wine menu.”

* * *

The lights are already off by the time Blake shambles back in from the bathroom, freshly showered and citrus-scented. _Because there’s effectively no reason NOT to steal Yang’s shampoo, now that they’re dating!_

Aside from the alarm clock and the shallow channel of moonlight through the curtains, the only light source is Yang’s scroll, further illuminating her already-bright smile once she spots her favorite faunus.

“Hey-hey. Saved you a spot,” she says, patting the bed beside her.

_No reason why she shouldn’t get to be cuddled by her girlfriend now that they’re dating, either! No more sleeping at the foot of the bed for her._

“How thoughtful.” Dry in wit even if the rest of her’s still a tad damp, Blake takes one last peek out into the hall, light still flooding up from the ground floor. “Your Dad’s gonna be awake when we leave, right?”

Yang pat-pats the bed again. She requisitioned cuddles, thank-you-very-much, not fretting! “Psh, yeah, he’s got weird teacher hours, and he set alarms too. He wouldn’t miss it.”

Blake is, as it happens, a fret-professional, and she can multitask regardless of cuddle state. She flumps her pajama-clad self into the bed just beside her partner and wastes no time in encroaching onto her side. Yang flicks her scroll shut and plugs it into its charger on the nightstand so she can devote her full attention to the faunus.

“M’kay. Did you go through your checklist again?” Blake asks. “I did mine, but…”

“Relaaaax,” Yang groans, hooking her left arm back behind Blake’s head and tugging her in for a hug. “Everything’s loaded up on ‘Bee or piled by the door. Meds’re packed, camping junk, toolkit, fresh fuel dust, dust for ammo, travel food, GOOD food… We’re ready to roll.” Aside from the ammunition, it almost feels like prepping for a casual getaway, rather than a dangerous trek through the tattered Post-Fall world.

It takes a second to realize Blake’s been strangely silent for a while now, her diligent thoughts of pre-trip prep seemingly shot out of the sky.

“Er… Blake?”

_“Mrnn…?”_

It takes ANOTHER second to hazard a guess why: Yang’s fingers, by no intentional measure, have happened to land just against the base of her feline girlfriend’s upper-left ear, tickling at the thin fur on the edges.

“ _Oh, grapes,_ sorry, I didn’t mean to– I wasn’t trying to touch ‘em on purpose or anything, just sorta happened, there.”

Yang still remembers the lecture the rest of Team RWBY’d earned in those early days after discovering Blake’s species: about how blithely begging to touch a faunus’ ears or tail for fun can be invasive, how it’s an incredibly intimate act in faunus culture, only expected between family and those given express permission.

She starts to try and tug her arm back, but from the way Blake’s rolled into their hug, it’s kinda pinned.

And Blake still doesn’t move.

“Really wasn’t trying to, uh… Something wrong?”

There’s a delay before any response. “It’s alright if it’s you, you know…” she mumbles into Yang’s sternum.

And if that’s not a bit of a shock. “Say-what-now?”

Blake shuffles off Yang’s arm, but in the process reaches up to latch onto her hand, dragging it _towards,_ not away from, the feline ears. Before Yang knows what’s happening, her fingertips are all brushing the unfairly, _inexplicably soft_ fur of an appendage which tentatively stretches up and rubs itself against her palm.

“You can touch,” Blake reiterates, hushed, and _gods-be-good_ she even nudges up against the hand.

Heck, the good lady asked, and Yang’s not going to leave her hanging. She starts out slowly, gently thumbing around the edges, the thinner cartilage. Blake seems to like that well enough, but the ear itself doesn’t become animated in its response until she carefully takes it between thumb and forefinger and gently kneads it. Even better, the happy sigh after applying her short fingernails to just barely scrape along the bases, scritching here and there.

Yang’s throat is feeling pretty darn parched, but no way is she rolling over to reach for the bottle of water on her nightstand. She wouldn’t even be able to look away from Blake if she wanted to, zeroed-in with sheer fascination to match her disbelief.

“Kind of weird, thinking how I asked if I could touch ‘em like a total jerk when we all first found out… and now I’m just...”

The effort’s started to feel a little stilted, so Yang gives one last scritch where she’s at, then slides to the opposite side, before the neglected twin forms a grudge. The bandages over Blake’s upper-right ear had finally come off today, no need to reapply now that her aura level’s been fully restored, with plenty of time to work its magic. Still sensitive, from how the faunus tells it, but no longer hurts to be bent.

The frightening gash she’d sported deep into the appendage is almost completely undetectable save a line of thinner fuzz marking its length. Lazily, Yang pushes the pad of her thumb along the path of the regrowing fur, like she can rub-rub a little bit of love into it to speed along the process. Like she can smudge away all the hurt left by Adam’s blade.

And that’s when she hears it first. A low and steady rumbling noise rippling from Blake’s throat as the faunus snuggles against her, so quiet at first Yang even stops breathing just to be certain she’s not imagining things.

_“Are you... **purring**?”_

Blake might, in fact, be purring. Once or twice at Beacon, sharing a bunk after a nightmare or bad depression spike, Yang had almost sworn she’d heard something similar, but always written it off as rasping noises, sinus congestion or something! But now she’s pressed in so-so-so close, closer than they ever allowed themselves back then, curves melding into one another, and she can not only hear, but _feel_ the burgeoning rumble in Blake’s chest against her own.

The faunus doesn’t give any coherent verbal response more than a hum. If Yang had to hazard a guess, her girlfriend’s sort of spaced out, lulled into an altered state by the gentle petting, and… _Ngh. Wait, wait._

She _really_ wants to keep this going as far as it happens to take them, but more than that she doesn’t want to come off like she’s taking advantage, or pushing things a bit too far, too fast, past the boundaries they’re still feeling out with one another.

With that in mind, Yang fires off a lighthearted, if slightly obnoxious joke so she can fall into their usual routine; get glared at and dismiss the tension! “So…! S’long as we’re revisiting the stupid stuff I did back then, does this mean you won’t get mad if I call you _kitten_ again?”

“Don’t you EVER call me that…” Blake begins to whisper.

Yang gulps. _Okay, a bit too far with that one, but she can backtrack to fix it if–_

“...where anyone else can hear.”

_Holy shit. Yang is going to marry this woman. They’re going to save the world one day, and she’s gonna propose on top of the pile of beat-up bad guys with the biggest, bestest ring lien can buy. They’re going to have a whole litter of adorable blonde cat babies with fiery shadow powers and live happily ever after._

Because at the end of it all, this isn’t just a girl she can see herself braving the jungles of Mistral with. This is absolutely the girl she can see herself braving _the rest of her life_ with.

“You got it, kitten,” Yang murmurs, dipping in for a chaste goodnight kiss that the faunus happily returns. Languidly, she keeps on petting, and Blake keeps on purring, until a rare, restful sleep comes around for them both.

They’ve got a big day ahead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So... that's ALMOST it. And I hope it's okay-ish.
> 
> That's not it-it YET, just a short lil' epilogue to finish this up once I give it a run-through again, here in the next day-or-two? But... kind of a trip, looking back, since I wasn't really sure about whether the dumb little 'What If' fic idea I had would even have enough juice in it to get to the end of Yang's V4 arc, or if I'd have to stretch it out by adding stuff as far as V6 but ultimately water it down and make it splotchy in the process.
> 
> Just... reeeeally hoping I can get a burst of, like... ideas and/or energy and/or focus here quick so I can like... start up a new fic/oneshot/whatever immediately after, even if m'still floundering over whether anybody'd wanna read it. And hiatus is still hanging overhead, still weeks left to go before we get a second half of the season, and I dunno if that'd drastically change my trajectory on what I'd wanna write, or motivate, or demotivate, or...! I dunno! Blaahhgh. I'm. I'm gonna go procrastinate and then proofread the epiloguey-bit.


	10. Epilogue: A Ship Set Sail

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Packed up, boarded, settled in, Mistral-bound together. Hang tight, RNJR. Team Bumblebee is on their way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short lil' epilogue to cap things off. Boatybees. Bees on a boat. Did they really never give the full name of this boat? Like, part of the name was 'Pride,' I think, but it was obscured...

Blake really, really hates foghorns, as it happens.

Earplugs with sufficient muffling that fit just right in faunus ears aren’t exactly as common as the flimsy foam nubs for the hominid variety, and _this_ faunus in particular has been kicking herself for not hunting some down before they left port.

Still, she can’t keep herself cooped up in their room the entire voyage to Mistral, so flattening her ears across her scalp, she posts up at the railing on the edge of the deck. Maybe after lunch, she can go nag the captain to have his crew keep the brain-mangling horn-toots to a minimum.

After all, she _does_ have some sway with him; the captain was quite vocal about his relief to have some capable huntresses aboard this trip. The deep ocean’s gone treacherous since the CCTS went down, and not just due to busted navigation systems.

It doesn’t take a scrutinizing eye to see a good portion of the deck has been repaneled recently, bits of the hull welded back together with rough seams and given a sloppy paintjob. Cosmetic cover-ups for the battle damage sustained in a nasty tussle with a Sea Feilong some while back, or so they say. Apparently they’d been lucky to stay afloat long enough to crawl back to a safe harbor at all, and the huntress pair’s presence should put some minds at ease.

Blake drums her fingers on the rusty underside of the rail and looks further down to stern. Yang’s still not back yet. The faunus has been teasing Yang about just how often she keeps visiting the garage belowdeck, making sure no sketchy sailor’s gotten handsy with her baby.

Thing is, Blake’s growing just about as protective of that bike by association, and for more sentimental reasons than its utility in getting them across Mistral instead of having to hoof it. Sure, all of Team RWBY’s been a passenger at some time or another – _including one disastrous instance attempting to pile on the full house_ – but now that she’s been their silent confidant on a late-night date, the embodiment of fond memories, of freedom, it’s grown on her. Besides, if Bumblebee is Yang’s baby, and she’s dating Yang, then doesn’t that make her... a stepmom? Step-biker? Food for thought.

Food for her stomach might be good too, if the other-mother-of-their-motorcycle-daughter she’s waiting on would show back up. _Really hope there’s no trouble._ They’ve not even made it past midday, and Blake would very much like to enjoy what little peace and quiet they can squeeze out on this plainly perilous journey.

Blake hasn’t felt a buzz in her pocket, though, so Yang can’t’ve texted her or changed their plans. She slumps a bit on the rail.

The thought strikes her she could still pull the thing out and try to get some more reading in, but… Nah. While not the sort of snob who turns her nose up at reading the digital books on her scroll, the nostalgic within her always pines a bit for the crispness and scent of physical pages, and thus, preference is given to the pair of paperbacks she’d packed in their luggage. A spare copy of _The Man With Two Souls_ as well; she’d always meant to give it another re-read, and with such a long road ahead, there’s no time like the present.

Blake had even been churning through a few of its chapters in bed while breakfast was being served – probably contributing to the grumbly tummy problem, if she’s honest. Given she now knows Yang’s been through the book, it couldn’t hurt to re-skim it for some riveting literary discussion to break up the travel monotony.

She might not be as far as the _dramatic reveal_ of the protagonist’s aura-duality just yet, but now that she mulls on it, staring out at the sea, it sparks a memory. That little joke Yang had made about the book, about soulmates, back on her second day in Patch. Back before she knew her feelings were returned.

_Suppose they truly **were.** That they really **were** soulmates._

Granted, the real-life mechanics of aura and soul-based manifestations as a whole don’t work nearly as simplistically as they do in the book’s mythos; she’s both read enough theory and endured enough practical application on the battlefield to know that… But, wouldn’t it be a nice thought?

That there are countless other Blakes out there, all of whom are still hopelessly, irrevocably entangled with myriad Yangs by some unseverable cosmic bond? Or that there have always been a pair of souls somewhere on Remnant, in each and every era, continuing to live, love, lose, yet never fail to find one other again in the next cycle.

_Alright, now Blake knows she’s getting too sappy, but she can’t help being an utter romantic at heart!_

“ _Ahoy!_ What’s THIS beautiful mermaid doing up on the deck?”

_An utter romantic for this utter dork, of all people._

Yang appears from the stairwell to the lower level. She shields her eyes from the sun, and the first thing they settle on after is Blake, who scoffs lightheartedly.

“...You’re shameless, but I’ll give you credit for not tripping over the low bar of a _‘cat-fish’_ pun.”

“Well, crap. There goes the rest of my material,” Yang laments, striding over to join her girlfriend at the rail and promptly snuggling into her back with a hug. “Good thing I’ve got my muse here to inspire me.”

“Pff. If _I’m_ what constitutes a muse, you might just need to up your standards.”

The throwaway line of self-degradation, while not uncommon for Blake, is bait for love-bullying Yang just can’t resist. She squeezes their bodies even closer, lowering to a sly whisper.

 _“Hey, now,”_ she husks close against Blake’s feline ear. _“I don’t wanna hear my kitten talk about herself like that.”_

Blake’s heart somehow simultaneously spasms to a halt, and pulses wildly. _Why-oh-gods-damned-why did she grant Yang the unmatched power of that nickname!? It’ll be the death of her! This… this stupidly charming girlfriend of hers!_

Changing her tone and her tune in a single beat of Blake’s racing heart, Yang drops the hug and gives the faunus a clap on the shoulder… either completely oblivious or acutely aware of her partner’s all-consuming blush.

“Now c’mon, let’s go grab some lunch before they run out! Last one there’s stuck with the trail rations!” she says with a sunshine grin... then promptly bails out running, making a bee-line straight for the dining room and laughing all the while.

Blake spares one last look at the sea, and one last moment for her wistful thoughts, before shoving off the rail right into a sprint, freely channeling her semblance to take flight after her girlfriend in a flurry of fading shadow-clones. She laughs too.

She hopes they’re doing well, all those other Blake and Yangs, those soulmates of other worlds, other timelines, other branches on the path. Hopes that some of them might have escaped the sorts of struggles they’ve endured in this one.

It’s a world with a lot of dark left before the dawn. Full of struggles and scars and the promise of a long fight ahead, before their happily ever after. And maybe the other paths might have been easier on herself and Yang, hurt less, taken less.

But if you ask Blake, she’s still liking the look of the one they’re charting right here and now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope this was okay. ( ._.) Like, the chapter, yeah, but... y'know. The whole thing in general.
> 
> M'kind of STILL spinning my wheels, mentally, on starting up new stuff -- and I might have to actually go back and re-re-rewatch V5+V6 if I wanna get ideas for this AU's version of those volumes -- But currently it's kinda like, bleh, not really knowing or having ideas for what people'd wanna read. I mean especially when a fair chunk of my prompt ideas are more Happy Huntress stuff, and I know people aren't really as into them as I am... Or a throwaway idea for a post-series aged up NSFW-ey Bees thing, which would be separate from this, but I'm not sure if there's enough substance to the idea yet to do THAT, and, and... and I still wanna find an excuse to do Frosen Steel too, and that's all only if I can get my brain to give me any motivation/focus/energy juice, and WHAT IF THE BACK HALF OF VOLUME 8 INTRODUCES RETCONNY LORE...! ( ;a;) 
> 
> ...I dunno. I'm just. Um. I guess I'm glad people seem to have wanted to stick around with whatever the heck this excuse for a fic was. Apologies if it was a bleh conclusion, double-thanks if it was okay. I'd like for it to be okay. I want to do okay. That would be nice. To be okay. (´−｀)


End file.
